Niantic has made 68 employees redundant as part of its company restructuring process following the sale of its gaming portfolio to Monopoly Go maker Scopely – a deal worth $3.5bn.
The deal has seen Scopely become owner of Niantic games Pokémon Go, Monster Hunter Now and Pikmin Bloom, and the new employer of the teams that work on those titles.
These layoffs, meanwhile, come from the remaining staff at Niantic working on other projects, as the organisation slims down and effectively rebrands as a startup, named Niantic Spatial.
Niantic had previously warned of job losses among its remaining team as part of this process. Now, as detailed in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) spotted by Game Developer, we know how many.
The company has declined to comment further about the job losses.
Niantic Spatial will focus on a refreshed version of Niantic’s original core interest – creating a digital map of the planet, now using geospatial AI. The newly-rebranded company has secured $250m of capital investment, $50m from Scopely and $200m from Niantic’s own balance sheet in order to move forward.
“We’re in the midst of seismic changes in technology, with AI evolving rapidly,” Niantic founder John Hanke wrote recently on Niantic Spatial’s focus. “Existing maps were built for people to read and navigate but now there is a need for a new kind of map that makes the world intelligible for machines, for everything from smart glasses to humanoid robots, so they can understand and navigate the physical world.
“Today’s LLMs represent the first step towards a future where a variety of expert models collaborate to reason and understand complex problems, and many of those problems will require deep and accurate knowledge of the physical world. Niantic is building the models that will help AI move beyond the screen and into the real world.”
Eurogamer recently travelled to a major Pokémon Go fan event in Italy, held shortly after the sale was announced, and heard of players’ mixed emotions regarding Scopely now being in charge.