Pokemon Go maker Niantic lays off 230 employees, cancels games

Niantic, a mobile games developer based successful San Francisco, announced Thursday that it would laic disconnected 230 employees arsenic portion of a reorganization.

The privately held institution volition besides cancel NBA All-World and halt accumulation connected a Marvel-based rubric that has not yet been released, according to a enactment from CEO John Hanke. It volition besides shutter a Los Angeles-based studio, wherever astir of the affected employees are based.

The determination highlights however the mobile games manufacture has shifted successful the years since Niantic landed its archetypal large hit, Pokemon Go, successful 2016. Since then, some Apple and Google's app stores person introduced changes that forestall advertizing tracking among apps, which has made advertizing to summation caller users much costly and unpredictable.

Hanke said the reorganization was owed to some "internal and outer factors," including an wide planetary macroeconomic slowdown.

"In the years since Pokémon GO's launch, the mobile marketplace has go crowded and changes to the app store and the mobile advertizing scenery person made it progressively hard to motorboat caller mobile games astatine scale," Hanke wrote.

Niantic said Thursday that supporting Pokemon Go is the company's "top priority."

Overall, App Store spending connected games declined 5% successful 2020 to $110 billion, according to an estimation from Data.ai, a probe firm.

The determination besides signals a displacement successful the scenery for augmented world applications, which tin integrate machine graphics and information into the existent world.

Pokemon Go tin show a integer monster interacting with the existent satellite done a phone's screen. But the exertion is starting to beryllium integrated into headsets oregon goggles that usage almighty cameras to integrate the existent and virtual worlds, which galore successful Silicon Valley spot arsenic the adjacent large computing platform. Earlier this year, Meta released its Quest Pro headset and aboriginal adjacent year, Apple volition merchandise its long-awaited Vision Pro headset.

Hanke's missive says these caller hardware products validate Niantic's strategy, but that it's lone an "intermediate stepping stone" to existent outdoor AR devices, which apt volition lucifer a lightweight brace of glasses with transparent displays.

"We judge that we tin physique cardinal contented and level services that volition assistance recognize the committedness of this technological shift," Hanke wrote.

Still, Hanke wrote, the AR marketplace is "developing much dilatory than anticipated, due to the fact that of exertion challenges and due to the fact that larger players are slowing down their investments successful airy of the macro environment."

Niantic had 1,050 employees arsenic of 2022 and past raised $300 cardinal astatine a post-money valuation of $9 cardinal successful November 2021, erstwhile tech valuations were astatine their frothiest peak, arsenic per Pitchbook.