After weeks of rumors that mobile technology company Niantic was nearing a deal for its high-profile games, including Pokemon Go, the $3.5 billion sale is public and includes news of an AI spinoff.
Niantic and Scopely, a Saudi Arabia-owned mobile games company with headquarters in Culver City, California, reached a deal to bring Pokemon Go, Monster Hunger Now and Pikmin Bloom to Scopely along with their entire development teams.
In a post about the deal, Niantic said it’s selling three of its “forever games” for $3.5 billion and will include $350 million of its cash distributed to equity holders.
Read more: Pokemon Go Has a New Owner, While Niantic Is Evolving Its Maps to Fold in AI and AR
Niantic, which spun off from Google in 2015 as a location-based apps and games company led by Google Maps and Google Earth pioneer John Hanke, will continue but will spin off Niantic Spatial, a new geospatial AI company led by Hanke. Niantic will invest $200 million in the spinoff, and Scopely will invest $50 million.
Hanke said in a LinkedIn post, “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 that they can understand and navigate the physical world… Niantic is building the models that will help AI move beyond the screen and into the real world.”
Niantic did not mention other location games it presumably still owns, including Peridot and Ingress Prime.
The Pokemon Go team leader, Ed Wu, assured fans that the game would evolve under Scopely, as it always has, but he was confident that it would improve with the entire team.
“I won’t say that Pokemon GO will remain the same because it has always been a work in progress,” Wu wrote. “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.”
Hoping for fresh changes to the game
Antonio Pavlinovic, a software developer who runs the Pokemon Go fan site Pokemon Go Hub, expressed optimism about the sale.
“We think that Scopely is going to bring a breath of fresh air into the game, which was missing in the past few years,” he told CNET. “Niantic has done a great job over the first 10 years with GO, but it always felt like the ‘gamey side’ of Pokemon Go was held back by Niantic’s AR and geospatial ambitions. The fact that they brought over the whole development team is also reassuring.”
Pavlinovic said that players shouldn’t expect immediate changes, but “we do expect changes in the future, especially with easing the Remote Raiding limitations, allowing Shadow Raids to be remote-raided, and lifting some of the limitations Niantic was imposing in pursuit of their vision of the game.”