By: Nick Gambino
Niantic Labs is selling their video game division to Scopely for a whopping $3.5 billion. The reason it can demand a price like that is because Niantic is the company behind Pokemon GO. If you weren’t there when Pokemon GO hit, you missed a historical moment.
Even for those who were around for it, it’s easy to forget what an absolute juggernaut phenomenon Pokemon GO was when it launched in 2016. The mobile game took the world, definitely the U.S., by storm. Within what felt like 24 hours, kids and adults alike were racing through the streets collecting Pokemon monsters. At least, I think that’s what they were doing. I’ll admit, I was never the biggest Pokemon fan.
But I remember the week the game hit vividly. It was a beautiful summer day. I was out on a walk after dinner in a busy downtown area. There were hundreds of people running around with their phones out. Later that evening I was in a completely different place, same story – crowds of people running around in a frenzy with their phones out. It was clear this was not some localized activity. It was ubiquitous.
There was something wholesome about a video game app that got people moving and engaged in the real world. The app boasted an insane 200 million users per month in its heyday. While that dropped significantly to about 50 million in just a few months, those are still impressive numbers.
Niantic was unable to capture the success of Pokemon GO with any of their other game releases. This is why they are now selling off their video game division. Scopely, the new owners, are the ones behind Monopoly Go, so it seems like the perfect fit.
While Pokemon GO bumped their numbers up to 100 million monthly active users in 2024, their sale to another company probably means there are some changes coming.
“I won’t say that Pokemon GO will remain the same, because it has always been a work in progress,” Ed Wu, Senior VP of Pokemon GO at Niantic, said in a blog post about the sale. “But how we create and evolve it will remain unchanged, and I hope that we can make the experience even better for all of you.”
As long as they don’t get rid of the features that made the mobile game so popular in the first place they’ll do just fine.
