{"id":28908,"date":"2025-04-18T00:48:08","date_gmt":"2025-04-18T00:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/28908\/"},"modified":"2025-04-18T00:48:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-18T00:48:08","slug":"following-the-sale-of-pokemon-go-and-other-games-for-3-8b-niantic-is-laying-off-more-staff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/28908\/","title":{"rendered":"Following the sale of Pokemon Go and other games for $3.8B, Niantic is laying off more staff"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Just a month ago, we learned that Niantic had secured a deal to sell its games division to Scopely<\/a>, a US-based studio that is part of Saudi Arabia\u2019s Savvy Games Group. That deal included Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now, and all the of their teams, for a whopping $3.85B US. At the time, Pokemon Go boss Ed Wu told fans that Scopely had picked up the entire POGO team, which led even our extremely skeptical Massively on the Go columnist Andrew to have some hope for the game\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

Well, I can\u2019t believe I\u2019m saying this, but it\u2019s starting to look like the game devs who moved from Niantic to Scopely actually got the better end of the deal by kind of a lot. That\u2019s because Niantic has just laid off another 68 staffers<\/a> who apparently didn\u2019t get to make that move and have now been deemed unnecessary detritus. The news became public thanks to a layoff notice published by Niantic as mandated by the California WARN Act.<\/p>\n

Last month, Niantic\u2019s John Hanke followed up the sale announcement by declaring that Niantic would be charting a \u201cbold new course\u201d with a focus on augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and geospatial technology. As we noted at the time, we have long suspected that POGO was merely the socially acceptable front for Niantic\u2019s actual data-harvesting and AI business, and that move only added to the evidence.<\/p>\n

This latest round of layoffs will, according to Hanke, allow the company to run as a \u201cstartup\u201d where \u201csome roles would not be required giving [Niantic\u2019s] new focus.\u201d You know, a startup that just sold its entire games division for almost $4B.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just a month ago, we learned that Niantic had secured a deal to sell its games division to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3162],"tags":[53,16,15,3243,3244],"class_list":{"0":"post-28908","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-technology","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-virtual-reality","12":"tag-vr"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}