Niantic just sold its entire game division for $3.5 billion, which includes the Pokemon Go, Monster Hunter Now, and the Pikmin Bloom teams, to California-based mobile game developer and publisher Scopely. There’s a lot of reasons why this sucks. It sucks to get fleeced for our location data by Niantic – even if it really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone – for the sake of an AI initiative that’s almost certainly going to make the world a worse place for everyone.
It sucks that Niantic founder John Hanke doesn’t actually care about games or Niantic’s stated values about building community, promoting physical health, and bringing people together through games. It sucks for the workers at Niantic who have no control over these decisions, and it sucks for players who are worried about the future of these games that mean so much to them.
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And it sucks that Scopely now owns every single one of them. The second-biggest mobile game publisher in the world made almost all of its $2.99 billion revenue last year off of a single game, the hideously predatory Monopoly Go, which uses every dark pattern in the mobile game playbook to separate players from their money.
I’m not saying Scopely is any more of an unethical company than Niantic, but it’s clearly a more shameless one. Scopely doesn’t care if its apps are just ads disguised as video games, which doesn’t bode particularly well for the future of Pokemon Go, or my beloved Monster Hunter Now.
Pokemon Go’s Ed Wu Says All The Right Things
Pokemon Go fans were quick to react negatively to the news with many of the same criticisms I’ve levied here, but to both Scopely and Pokemon Go chief Ed Wu’s credit, the messaging around the sale has tried to address every reasonable concern head-on.
In an update on Pokemon Go’s website Wu promises that Scopely leadership has a deep admiration for Pokemon Go, its development team, and the values that they share with the player community. He promises that the entire development team is staying together, and that moving to a company solely focused on games is going to benefit Pokemon Go in the long run. He ends the post with “I won’t say that Pokémon GO will remain the same, because it has always been a work in progress. But how we create and evolve it will remain unchanged,”
These are meant to be words of assurance to the players, and Wu is saying all the right things. No one wants to see Scopely’s influence cheapen Pokemon Go by making it more ad-driven, more microtransaction-filled, and more predatory. Wu’s post asks us not to worry at this stage, and to believe that this change will in fact benefit the game and its players. As much as I’d love to believe all that to be true, I simply cannot.
Game Companies Will Never Stop Lying To You
Why should I, or anyone, believe what a game executive has to say about the future of a company or game? They’re allowed to lie, y’know, and in fact, they do it all the time with absolutely no consequences. This is especially true when it comes to mergers and acquisitions in the game industry. When Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in October 2023 it promised the FTC there would be no layoffs as a result of the merger. Microsoft then kicked off 2024 by laying off 2,000 people, before cutting another 650 jobs last September.
The same thing happened at Bungie after it was acquired by Sony in 2022. Employees were reportedly repeatedly assured that there would be no layoffs or restructuring as part of the acquisition, but multiple rounds of layoffs, including 220 jobs last August, proves that wasn’t true.
These companies lie about this stuff because they can. I want to believe Scopely and Wu, but every time I hear X billion dollar sales in the game industry, it’s always shortly followed by studio closures, lost jobs, and destroyed lives. How many studios has Embracer bought and shuttered in the last five years? This is just the way the game industry works.
No One Really Knows What’s Coming Next
For argument’s sake, let’s say Wu’s post is one hundred percent earnest. He means everything he says here and he has all the assurances from Scopely to make him believe that his team is safe and that Pokemon Go will flourish under new leadership. Even if he sincerely believes everything he’s saying, it still doesn’t matter. This entire industry is a house of cards waiting for the gentlest breeze to knock it down, and if you’re paying attention to the political and economic climate right now, the forecast is calling for one hell of a breeze.
No one in the game industry can promise you tomorrow – particularly a VP caught in the middle of a multi-billion dollar acquisition. Pokemon Go could last generations or it could get completely removed from the app store a year from now, and the honest truth is that no one knows which one will happen, not even the people making it. I think words of assurance to the player community in times like this are important, but I also know they don’t mean anything beyond the fact that Pokemon Go has a great PR team. I wish the best for the developers and for the future of Niantic’s games, but with the way this industry operates these days, I expect the worst.
- Released
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July 6, 2016
- ESRB
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e
- Developer(s)
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Niantic, The Pokemon Company