Niantic’s LA office will be shut down and the company lays off 230 employees

The company behind Pokemon GO, Niantic announced some difficult changes for the organization on Thursday. Niantic’s LA office will be closing and they made the difficult decision to lay off around 230 employees. This comes after the decision to narrow their focus on mobile game investments.

“I have made the decision to narrow our focus for mobile game investments, concentrating on first party games that most strongly embody our core values of location and local social communities. The mobile gaming market is very mature and only the best and most differentiated titles have a chance to succeed. We also want to increase our focus on building for the emerging class of MR devices and future AR glasses.” John Hanke said.

“Specifically, this means we will be closing our LA studio, reducing our game platform team and making additional reductions across the company. As a result, we will be sunsetting NBA All-World and stopping production on Marvel: World of Heroes. This means we are laying off around 230 Niantics.”

There are a number of reasons as to why this happened. A reason for this move is due to the fact they allowed their expenses to grow faster than revenue. During covid they saw a surge in revenue and hired more employees to help at the time.

This won’t impact Pokemon GO, Pikmin Bloom, Peridot, Monster Hunter Now or any recent launches.

Source: Niantic