Recap: Many memorable issues occurred in 2016: Donald Trump received the US election race, David Bowie and Prince died, and Pokémon Go grew to become a world phenomenon. However the firm behind the cellular AR recreation, Niantic, hasn’t been in a position to repeat that success, resulting in layoffs and canceled tasks.
Bloomberg writes that Niantic Chief Government Officer John Hanke advised employees in an e mail that the corporate was “dealing with a time of financial turmoil” and had already been “decreasing prices in a wide range of areas.”
San Francisco-based Niantic has reportedly canceled 4 tasks: a Transformers spin-off introduced final yr known as Heavy Steel; Hamlet, which might have been a collaboration with Punchdrunk, the theatrical firm behind the interactive play Sleep No Extra; and two different tasks known as Blue Sky and Snowball, although they might have been codenames.
Niantic can also be stated to have laid off 85 to 90 folks, or about 8% of its complete employees, however which may not be the top of the cuts as Hanke stated the corporate must “additional streamline our operations so as to greatest place the corporate to climate any financial storms which will lie forward.”
To say Pokémon Go had an enormous cultural impression can be an understatement. It set a brand new document for the variety of downloads in its first week, with folks spending extra time on the app than Fb. It had hit a billion downloads by 2019 and at one level was producing $1 billion per yr in income.
However Niantic has failed to search out comparable success with its different titles. Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, a recreation that copied the Pokémon Go format, was closed down earlier this yr. There was additionally Pikmin Bloom and Catan, neither of which have come near matching the recognition of Pikachu and co.
Niantic confirmed the layoffs to Kotaku. “We just lately determined to cease manufacturing on some tasks and scale back our workforce by about eight p.c to deal with our key priorities,” stated a spokesperson. “We’re grateful for the contributions of these leaving Niantic, and we’re supporting them by this tough transition.” It added that the cutbacks will permit it to deal with “new experiences” and the corporate will “proceed investing in the way forward for AR.”
One of many video games Niantic will proceed engaged on is NBA All-World, a just-announced recreation created in partnership with the NBA through which gamers “can discover, problem, and compete towards immediately’s NBA ballers of their neighborhoods.”