Pokemon Go players hunt for Pokemon and other game items in the Pasadena Playhouse District
PG/Bauer-Griffin | GC Images | Getty Images
San Francisco-based mobile game developer Niantic announced Thursday that it will lay off 230 employees as part of a restructuring.
The privately held company will also cancel NBA Global and stop making unreleased Marvel movies Note from CEO John Hanke. It will also close a studio in Los Angeles. Most of the affected employees are there.
The move highlights how the mobile gaming industry has changed over the past few years since Niantic launched its first hit game, Pokemon Go, in 2016. apple and Google’App stores have made changes to block ad tracking between apps, making advertising to acquire new users more expensive and less predictable.
Hanke said the restructuring was due to “internal and external factors”, including an overall slowdown in the global macro economy.
“The mobile market has become crowded since the launch of Pokémon GO, with changes in the app store and mobile advertising landscape making it increasingly difficult to launch new mobile games at scale,” Hanke wrote.
Niantic said Thursday that supporting Pokemon Go is the company’s “top priority.”
App Store gaming spending overall will drop 5% in 2020 to $110 billion, according to estimates from research firm Data.ai.
The move also marks a shift in the field of augmented reality applications, which can integrate computer graphics and data into the real world.
Pokemon Go can show digital monsters interacting with the real world through the phone screen. But the technology is beginning to be integrated into headsets or goggles, using powerful cameras to integrate the real and virtual worlds, and many in Silicon Valley see it as the next major computing platform. Earlier this year, Yuan The Quest Pro headset was released, and early next year Apple will release the long-awaited Vision Pro headset.
Hanke’s letter said that these new hardware products validate Niantic’s strategy, but it is only an “intermediate stepping stone” to a true outdoor AR device, which may resemble a pair of lightweight glasses with a transparent display.
“We believe we can build the key content and platform services that will help deliver on the promise of this technology shift,” Hanke wrote.
Still, the AR market is “moving slower than expected because of technical challenges and large players are slowing down investments given the macro environment,” Hanke wrote.
Niantic, which has 1,050 employees as of 2022, last raised $300 million in November 2021 at a post-money valuation of $9 billion. brochure.
Svlook
