https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/29/niantic-lays-off-230-employees-cancels-nba-and-marvel-games/
Don't cancel those precious Marvel games, such a tragedy! Anyways...
Maybe they can recover by adding more rainbow flags to Pokemon Go and charging more for Raid passes.
Pokemon Go got bigger than was sustainable, which made the company look super appealing to every license and blew them up far bigger than they ever were capable of handling.
If only it could have been obvious from the start that 95% of the PGO players weren't going to last and they shouldn't grow based on that bloated value.
It isn't bigger than it can sustain so long as a glowie leads it. Reminder that Niantic's CEO, former glowie and founding CEO of Keyhole (which was funded by In-Q-Tel, a CIA [yes that CIA] venture capital arm) is in charge and previously developed Ingress, a "game" that took detailed gps data and basically was an AR game around taking photoes of building's interior layouts with more points for places they didn't have data on. Niantic is in no danger as long as it keeps harvesting real-time location data and photographs of the layouts of buildings.
I was just lookin at things I’ve played and pretty much everything I’ve spent time in recently has been no newer than PS3/360 age or from a smaller developer. I used to complain about indie stuff because no, I did not want to play another 2D platformer with insane difficulty so I could reimagine my youth of not playing those then either. The quality and variety has gone up so much since though.
No reason to bother with this big budget drivel. Don’t care about licensed games or bad gameplay surrounded by beautiful cutscenes of non binary porn fiction.
They are making a Monster Hunter game too, which I have no interest in.
They cancelled their LA department and anyone designing games from there. So, California loses again.