Summary
I guess $3.8 billion doesn’t go as far as it used to. The extent ofNiantic Spatial’s layoffs has been confirmed by a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN)reportin California (nice spot,Game Developer).
Niantic Spatial is the remaining assets and staff of Niantic following the sale of the company’s gaming division (Niantic Games) to Scopely. Despite the massive revenue from the sale, Niantic Spatial immediately announced layoffs following the split.
Niantic Spatial’s focus is purely on the geospatial technology the games division built its games on.
The ‘Ol Sell & Lay-Off
In ablog postreleased on the same day as the layoffs, Niantic Spatial chief executive officer John Hanke outlined the reasoning behind the layoffs, saying Niantic Spatial “will need to operate as a start-up organisation” and claiming the company’s renewed focus on geospatial artificial technology means some roles “would not be required.”
On the same day as the blog post went live, 68 employees were informed that they were being laid off. This exact number of employees was confirmed by the aforementioned WARN report. It appears Niantic Spatial iswholly focusing on artificial intelligencenow that its former game division is being run by Scopely.
Niantic Games, meanwhile, has assured Pokémon Go players thatnothing is going to change under the stewardship of Scopely. A representative of Niantic reportedly said, “The direction of our game will not undergo any major changes under the influence of Scopely. They will just be supporting its further development, and we will keep doing what we’ve been doing since the beginning. To put it more bluntly - please rest assured we will not be shutting down the game.”
Fans remain skeptical of Scopely’s influence on Pokémon Go as the mobile publisher has a well-documented history of aggressive monetisation. However, others are cautiously optimistic about the future of the game.
