Niantic is close to selling Pokémon Go to Scopely for $3.5bn, according to a Bloomberg report.
The deal could be announced in the coming weeks, says the report, and could also include the rest of Niantic’s live games Monster Hunter Now, Pikmin Bloom, Ingress Prime and Peridot.
Bloomberg cited anonymous sources close to the matter, and noted that neither Scopely or Niantic commented when contacted.
Scopely said in October last year that it was lining up a “megadeal” involving “a scaled global franchise doing hopefully at least a billion dollars in revenue” – and it sounds like this might be it.
In that same interview, Scopely’s Tim O’Brien said the firm’s M&A team is the “tip of the spear” for the deployment of the $38bn Savvy Games Group has earmarked for games acquisitions. Scopely was acquired by Savvy Games Group for $4.9bn in April 2023. Savvy is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
Niantic’s other releases have not replicated the success of Pokémon Go. It launched Harry Potter: Wizards Unite in June 2019, but announced it would be killing the game in November 2021. We reported in February 2023 that NBA All World earned just $160k in its first month, and it was later closed within a couple of months of launch. Virtual pet sim Peridot has not made much impact either.
Niantic’s collaborations with Capcom and Nintendo have fared better. Monster Hunter Now has been a success, pulling in $4-5m per month in IAP, according to Appmagic estimates. It also co-developed Nintendo’s Pikmin Bloom, which earns $2.5-3m per month, again according to Appmagic estimates.
Niantic laid off 230 staff in June 2023, at the same time closing its LA studio and cancelling forthcoming game Marvel: World of Heroes. The US firm has also previously worked on, and later cancelled, location-based games based on Transformers and Settlers of Catan IP.
Despite being best known for Pokémon Go, Niantic seems committed to powering what it sees as a coming wave of AR software. It has made several acquisitions in the AR tech space, and took on a $300m investment in November 2022 to build what it called a ‘real-life metaverse’.
More recently, Niantic rebranded its AR tech efforts as its ‘Spatial Platform’, in line with Apple’s insistence on calling AR ‘spatial computing’.
In November 2024 Niantic announced it was ‘building a large geospatial model to achieve ‘spatial intelligence’ – in other words, a way of creating 3D maps using scans of public real-world locations using AI.
