Pokémon Go developer Niantic has laid off 230 people, shut its Los Angeles studio, canceled its previously announced Marvel: World of Heroes, and is closing down NBA All-World.
Niantic founder John Hanke sent out an email to employees and the company later shared the email publicly. The slate of decisions comes as expenses “grew faster than revenue” and also blames growth in the AR game market that has happened since Pokémon Go's successful launch back in 2016. Also a factor is a lack of longer-term engagement that the team is looking for.
“Teams need platform tools that are force multipliers, enabling them to build at the highest quality with powerful engagement features quickly and efficiently. Our AR map and platform must deliver the features that developers want in a robust and reliable way. We have not met our goals in all of these areas,” Hanke says.
As a result of these factors all converging, the company is also pulling back from in-house game development, although it will focus on continuing to support Pokémon Go and already released games Pikmin Bloom, Peridot, and Monster Hunter Now. Of course, if there were issues with longer-term engagement, then those four remaining games seem to still need work to meet the goals that the team wants to see.
The company’s “top priority is to keep Pokémon GO healthy and growing as a forever game,” the email says, emphasizing that while they’ve made “changes” to the team, “the product and team continues to grow”.
Hanke also noted that the studio saw new revenue pouring in during the COVID-19 pandemic, but revenue has been declining since. This news comes amid controversial changes to remote raiding, including increasing the price remote raid passes and capping the number of remote raids per day.
During the pandemic, remote raiding was added, and it became a major source of revenue for Pokémon Go. The changes have also led to some protests, with people declining to buy more raid passes and asking the company to reverse its decisions, but so far they've been standing by them.
