Niantic, the company behind the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go, is looking to sell its game development business, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources.
The company is reportedly exploring a deal with mobile game developer Scopely, which is owned by Saudi Arabia-based Savvy Games Group, to sell the unit for about $3.5 million.
Niantic and Scopely did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Niantic has been among the few companies that have been able to successfully use its augmented reality chops to build games. Its first title, Ingress, was widely praised for its unique, geography-based take on territory control, but the company truly skyrocketed to fame with Pokémon Go, which took off in 2016 and quickly became a global phenomenon.
Its subsequent titles have been relatively successful, but not at the scale Pokémon Go enjoyed. In 2022, the company let go of 8% of its staff and shuttered four projects, including Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. In 2023, it laid off 230 employees and canceled its NBA and Marvel-related games.
Last year, it updated its Scaniverse app to let users create models of real-world objects and provide the data to developers. In November, the company said it wanted to build a large geospatial model that would use machine learning to “understand a scene and connect it to millions of other scenes globally.”
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