2023-06-30 11:19:17
Niantic, best known for its hugely popular Pokemon Go, will lay off 230 people. A series of games in development are also being discontinued.
Since Pokemon Go’s heyday in 2016, Niantic’s revenue growth has slowed markedly, CEO John Hanke said. A poor performance that he attributes in particular to the health crisis and the general economic situation. According to John Hanke, the mobile games market has also become much more demanding in recent years, and saturation is looming.
Niantic specializes in augmented reality games. In the case of Pokemon Go, the game installed on your smartphone allowed you to catch the cartoon characters in the physical world. Its success spurred Niantic to create similar games for Harry Potter and the NBA basketball federation, though without finding the success of Pokemon. Johen Hanke now seems to want to focus on the original Pokemon game, which retains a huge following.
To save money, the Niantic studio in Los Angeles will notably be closed. These layoffs also have implications for the company’s games. Support for NBA All World, a mobile game that has only been available since January, will thus be removed: it will therefore no longer be subject to updates. Another announced game, Marvel: World of Heroes, is scrapped altogether. This is already the second wave of layoffs in a short time for Niantic: a year ago, the company also cut regarding eighty jobs and abandoned several projects
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