Niantic, Inc. (Independent)

The independent gaming studio that gave the world Ingress, Pokémon GO, and a decade of audacious promises about the future of augmented reality sold its entire games business to Scopely for approximately $3.5 billion. The “Independent Niantic” is dead. Mind the robots on your way out.

Niantic, Inc. was spun out of Google in October 2015 under the leadership of John Hanke, who had previously led Google Earth and Google Maps. This origin story—a mapping company that made games to get people to map things for it—tells you most of what you need to know about what the company ultimately became.

On March 12, 2025, it was announced that Scopely, a subsidiary of the Saudi-backed Savvy Games Group, would acquire Niantic’s gaming business—including Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom, Monster Hunter Now, and the Campfire social platform. The deal officially closed on May 29, 2025, for a reported $3.5 billion.

What survived the transaction is “Niantic Spatial Inc.“—a leaner organization, still led by Hanke, that has pivoted entirely away from consumer gaming to focus on geospatial AI, Large Geospatial Models (LGM), and the Niantic Spatial Development Kit (NSDK). Their stated mission, with admirable candor, is to build “maps for robots.” The decade of games, the communities, the failed betas, the heartbroken Harry Potter fans—all of it was, in retrospect, a very expensive and roundabout way to photograph every Starbucks on Earth.

On May 20, 2025, the newly formed Niantic Spatial immediately laid off 68 employees who had been in the “game-making” part of the business. Because once you’ve sold the games, you no longer need the people who made them.

The graveyard you are currently reading is, technically, a product of the company that no longer exists. We find this appropriate.