Pokémon Go sold for billions just months after announcing user data was compiled to build geospatial mapping

Niantic is done with Pokemon Go just four months after it revealed it had farmed user-contributed scans to create a “large geospatial model to achieve spatial intelligence.”

Pokemon Go announced in a blog post that it has been purchased by Scopely, with the entire development team for the app and game moving along with it.

“Today I wanted to share some important news,” lead developer Ed Wu explained. “Pokémon GO will be joining Scopely, a video game developer and publisher home to a wide range of leading games and talented teams around the world.”

As reported by Fandom Pulse, the deal is a reportedly worth a whopping $3.5 billion.

Scopely already develops games like Monopoly Go!, WWE Champions, and Marvel Strike Force, which are a specific type of mobile game meant for casual gamers.

Developer Wu said that he hoped Scopely being a private company would help drive a focus toward the game’s long-term health as opposed to short-term.

“Scopely’s status as a private company also means we can prioritize what’s best for you, our Trainers, for the long term,” Wu added. “We believe that prioritizing short-term gains at the expense of our long-term mission would be counterproductive and self-defeating.”

The huge sale comes just months after Blaze News reported that Niantic had been compiling a mass library of images to build its artificial intelligence mapping models.

Seemingly in attempt build a competitor to or an addition to Google Street View/Google Maps, Niantic had users contribute to its “Scaniverse” by enabling an option in Pokémon Go that placed Pokemon in the user’s real world. This made it so that when a user looked at his phone, it appeared as if the Pokémon was actually standing in front of him in a park, on a street, or inside a building.

Niantic said the feature was “completely optional” and required users to “visit a specific publicly accessible location and click to scan.”

The company boasted that it had “trained more than 50 million neural networks, with more than 150 trillion parameters, enabling operation in over a million locations.”

Though the feature was optional, Niantic said it took in around 1 million “fresh scans” per week containing “hundreds of discrete images.”

The real reason Niantic needed users for these mapping techniques was due to ever-changing terrains, landmarks, and hard-to-reach places that photo-robots could not traverse.

Niantic explained that it was unable to piece together proper measurements and unseen sides of any given object or location. The example of a winding European street was used, with fluctuating elevation and unique objects.

“Appearance changes based on time of day and season. … The shape of many man-made objects follow specific rules of symmetry or other generic types of layouts — often dependent on the geographic region,” the company explained at the time.

Niantic’s senior vice president of engineering, Brian McClendon, also made remarks about possible military applications for the geospatial model; read more about that on Return here.

Following the purchase, Scopely announced in its own press release that it had long admired Niantic’s ability to pioneer “vibrant communities.”

Meanwhile, Niantic noted in separate press release that it planned on continuing to operate its other augmented reality games, Ingress Prime and Peridot, as “best-in-class applications of the geospatial platform.”

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