Niantic says goodbye to 68 employees after selling their game business to Scopely, and becomes Niantic Spatial, a new stage focused on digital cartography and geospatial artificial intelligence.
Last March it was announced that Scopey had acquired the video game business of Niantic, the creators of Pokémon Gofor 3500 million dollars. Now we know that Niantic has fired 68 employees as part of an internal restructuring that follows the recent sale of its video game catalog to Scopely.
The agreement included the rights of titles as Pokémon Go, Monster Hunter Now and Pikmin Bloomas well as the incorporation of their respective teams to the new owner. The layoffs affect the staff that remained in Niantic working on projects not related to those gamesand mark a transition in which the company operates as a Startup smaller, now called Niantic Spatial.
The future of Niantic: Advanced digital cartography by geospatial artificial intelligence
According to the medium Game Developer Through documents of the Warn Labor Notification Program, Niantic had already anticipated that template cuts would be produced. The company, however, has chosen not to make more statements about it.
The new stage of Niantic Spatial will be focused on the Development of advanced digital cartography by geospatial artificial intelligencerecovering its original vision: build a world map that not only guides people, but also machines. With an initial investment of 250 million dollars (50 million contributed by Scopely and 200 million of the capital of Niantic), the company wants to create Technology capable of feeding from smart glasses to humanoid robots. In the words of the founder John Hanke, “we need a new type of map that humans can not only read, but also allow machines to understand and navigate the physical world.”
Regarding the future of Pokémon Gonow in the hands of Scopely, the owners of the millionaire Monopoly Go!we will see in the coming months if important changes occur in the successful augmented reality game released in 2016, or if it follows a continuous line.
