An nameless reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Pokemon GO maker Niantic laid off 230 workers immediately, only one 12 months after it laid off round 90 workers. Throughout final 12 months’s layoffs, Niantic canceled 4 tasks, together with a Transformers recreation. Some Niantic video games will meet the identical destiny this time round. After 4 months within the App Retailer, Niantic is shutting down NBA All-World; the corporate may also cancel manufacturing on a recreation based mostly on the Marvel franchise. “Within the wake of the income surge we noticed throughout Covid, we grew our headcount and associated bills in an effort to pursue development extra aggressively,” CEO John Hanke wrote in an e mail to workers, cross-posted to the corporate weblog.
This has been a standard chorus among the many a whole bunch of tech corporations which have performed layoffs over the past 12 months — corporations claimed they overhired through the pandemic and now have to right-size their groups. In Niantic’s case, Hanke stated that income has returned to pre-pandemic ranges, and new tasks haven’t delivered as a lot income as they might have hoped. One such new venture is Peridot, a Tamagotchi-like cell recreation. Niantic’s first try at authentic IP since Ingress, Peridot launched in Could. However in response to market intelligence agency Sensor Tower, Peridot has solely made $1.4 million in gross in-app buy income to this point. […] Pokemon GO is Niantic’s money cow, pulling in additional than $1 billion in in-app purchases every year since 2020. However gamers have additionally been feeling slighted by Niantic’s in-app buy system. […]
Although video games like Peridot haven’t but proved financially sustainable, Niantic has a whole enterprise arm separate from its personal video games. Niantic’s Lightship AR developer equipment makes it potential for any developer who is aware of find out how to use Unity to make AR video games. Builders even have entry to Niantic’s spectacular visible positioning system (VPS), which lets customers work together with native landmarks of their real-world environment. Hanke even talked about in his notice to workers that the corporate needs to ramp up its give attention to constructing for mixed-reality gadgets and AR glasses. So, if Niantic can not seem to make a profitable follow-up to Pokemon GO, possibly its developer instruments can preserve the corporate heading in the right direction.