Five years ago, on 6 July 2016, Pokémon Go, the first smartphone video game dedicated to Pokémon, was released in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. The game, which arrived in Italy on July 15, exploited augmented reality and allowed its many players to travel around the real world in search of those strange little animals known as Pokémon. Partly because it was based on the largest media franchise in the world and partly because it allowed outdoor play, the game was immediately a huge success and a relevant cultural phenomenon that Niantic, the Californian company that developed it, continues to ride with big profit.
Because yes, a lot of people keep playing it. Nevertheless, Niantic – which even before Pokémon Go had successfully dedicated itself to videogame augmented reality – is looking beyond, in video games but not only. To try to reap the benefits of something that he began to sow twenty years ago.
The story of what would later become Niantic began in 2001 when, as the company itself tells us, “a small team of computer scientists, gamers, cartographers and AI researchers , passionate about geospatial applications and technologies »created Keyhole. An interactive 3D map program whose evolution, once the project passed under Google, became Google Earth. “I joined Google with the idea of staying there for six months,” John Hanke, founder and CEO of Niantic, told Tech Crunch, “then I stayed there another six months, and then, six months after six months, it ended up being more ten years “.
Before being an autonomous company, Niantic (at the time known as Niantic Labs) was in fact an internal project within Google, from which it separated only in 2015, the year in which got around $ 35 million in funding, became a fully-fledged independent private company, and started working on developing Pokémon GO.
Before that, however, it had developed and introduced the Field app Trip (“a location-based mobile app that, just like a guide, points out the most extraordinary and hidden things in the area around you”) and, above all, got noticed and appreciated with Ingress, a game of 2012 in some ways very similar to Pokémon GO.
Ingress, which in the meantime has evolved into Ingress Prime , was and is a game that uses augmented reality and geolocation to allow players to travel around the real world in search of things that allow them to level up. The premises of the game are science fiction, and – unlike Pokémon Go – unrelated to any pre-existing media product. The fictitious premise of the game is that in 2012, together with the Higgs boson, something known as “exotic matter” was also discovered: a strange and very powerful matter that seems to have an alien origin and – in short – allows those who control it to dominate the world. Those who play Ingress are therefore divided into two factions (the Illuminati and the Resistance) who are competing with each other to seek and accumulate this “exotic stuff”.
In other words, Ingress is a gigantic flag-stealer who, thanks to augmented reality, exploits places in the real world. Compared to Pokémon Go it is also a slightly more serious game, for example with less vivid, playful and cartoony colors.
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Ingress had a good following, but it never became the worldwide phenomenon that was Pokémon Go. A video game that, according to data cited by Niantic, in its first three months made his players travel more than eight billion kilometers in total and that before the end of 2016, therefore in less than six months, generated revenues in excess of one billion dollars. And that although less has been said about it and many we have removed it from their days or from their smartphones, it continued to go strong even after.
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In 2017 the Pokémon Go app was downloaded more than 650 million times and the kilometers traveled became more than 15 billion. In 2018, downloads were 800 million and in 2019 the game generated revenues of over 900 million dollars. All while in the meantime, among other things, the possibility of making challenges between coaches (much desired by many) and special challenges to unlock new species of Pokémon had been added.
The pandemic and the travel restrictions were major problems for a game that relied on the movement of its players. Niantic, however, has been able to circumvent them by preparing a series of relevant changes to the game system with relative speed, so as to make it usable even indoors, from home.
After 2019 had already been, from revenue point of view, Pokémon Go's best year, with coronavirus involved it was hard to do better. Instead, in 2020 Pokémon Go made it, with revenues that, according to estimates prepared by the analysis company Sensor Tower, were over a billion dollars.
In a few years, in short, Thanks to the possibilities of in-game purchases, Pokémon Go generated revenues that are estimated to exceed $ 5 billion and allowed Niantic – a former San Francisco startup whose name is a tribute to a whaling ship that arrived in the city at the time of the gold rush – to reach a valuation close to 4 billion dollars.
Meanwhile, Niantic has also dedicated itself to other things. Although many may not have noticed, in the summer of 2019 he launched Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, a game that wanted to do with the wizarding world of Harry Potter what Pokémon Go had done with Pokémon (for example, bring up a Goblin from the magic bank. Gringotts in the editorial staff of the Post) and which, although technically very advanced, did not get a large following, perhaps because it was too similar to Pokémon Go.
– Read also: The invention of Pokémon
Despite the relative misstep that was Wizards Unite, there is no doubt that in recent years Niantic has been able to accumulate skills, information on its users and lots of money to use to finance and develop new projects. As Bloomberg wrote, Niantic “plans to be much more than a meteor.” This is why he is working on several other games that take advantage of augmented reality in their own way and, looking even further, “he is trying to become something bigger than a video game studio”.
In particular, it seems that Niantic wants to exploit its prominent position in the nascent context of augmented reality. For some years now it seems to many the possible next big thing, an imminent and important technological innovation; but which, due to a series of problems (technical, but not only), is struggling to establish itself in a widespread and truly relevant way. It is likely, in fact, that the main interaction of many with augmented reality took place precisely – and almost only – thanks to Pokémon Go.
First of all, in the short and medium term, in Niantic's plans there they are still video games like Pokémon Go. Because, as Bloomberg wrote, for now “the company is largely based on the fortunes of that game, but it knows it needs a new success”.
Already in the coming months, after a soft start in countries like Australia and New Zealand, an augmented reality game developed together with Hasbro and based on the Transformers, the alien robots that transform into means of land transport, should arrive protagonists of a recent film saga. According to Hanke, “it is almost as if the Transformers were designed specifically for augmented reality, because they are not the protagonists of battles on distant galaxies, but of clashes that take place on Earth, perhaps in the middle of Los Angeles”.
Bloomberg also wrote that to date Niantic is working on the development of ten different games, “aimed at different target gamers”. And that after the pandemic, during which it hasn't released any new games, it could present more than one in a few months. Among the various games the company is working on, there is one about Pikmin (of the partially plant creatures protagonists of a series of Nintendo games) and another based on the Catan boxed game: both should be released by the end of 2021.
But as the Transformers game and other similar games may also have similar fates to the Harry Potter world, Niantic is looking even further, in various ways. For example, it is working on the creation of tools, platforms and programs related to virtual reality to be sold or given in concession to other developers.
More generally and with a medium and long-term perspective, Niantic is moving to occupy as much as possible the context of augmented reality, even beyond video games. For example, it is collaborating with the microchip manufacturer Qualcomm to create augmented reality viewers (which, however, could only remain a prototype). And in recent years it has acquired several companies and startups that deal with augmented reality, with applications in very different contexts: from tourism to furniture, from urban planning to education.
” Niantic is continuing to focus strongly on the idea that consumers want to go towards augmented reality “, Tech Crunch had written in November 2020, in an article that told of the company's intention to” build a 3D map, constantly updated, of the whole world “. An “intelligent” map, capable of updating itself from time to time by exploiting information and images provided by users.
Niantic finds itself in a peculiar situation. He is certainly at the forefront of augmented reality (according to data cited by Bloomberg, 85 percent of the overall earnings from video games that leverage augmented reality are his), but augmented reality is largely an unrealized promise. . Partly because there is a lack of certain technology capable of fully exploiting its potential, partly because, as analyst Julie Ask always explained to Bloomberg, “consumers are not interested in augmented reality per se, they are interested in it. that augmented reality can do for them “. And often, it is still not clear what it can do, in practice.
Moreover, although in a position of evident advantage as regards video games, in the augmented reality sector Niantic is at compete with huge companies like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon or Google. According to Tech Crunch, what Niantic and all these companies can do is “work patiently on research and development, thus hoping to be ahead of the curve when augmented reality technology grows.” However, it is an activity that requires funds, patience and the possibility of investing today to earn, if necessary, in several years. And it is clear that larger companies than Niantic can afford far greater funds and expectations.
Meanwhile, however, while Pokémon Go continues to bring in earnings after five years, Niantic has already become, according to Tech Crunch , “One of the software companies that have most transformed the way we think about how we move in space”.
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