Games are huge projects which require a lot of resources and team members which Niantic doesn't seem to have. Even with all the revenue brought in by Pokemon GO, the company has announced that it will be canceling multiple upcoming products and cutting a percentage of their staff. This is due to the result of the company being unable to land another successful title following Pokemon GO.
Niantic Cuts Projects And Workforce
In 2016, Niantic rose to success with the launch of the highly popular AR mobile game, Pokemon GO. Even though the game continues to remain active with periodic updates and events, it's simply not producing enough to support the whole company. Despite all the efforts the team has been making to create another hit, Niantic is in dire straits which is trickling down to its projects and its people. The company has decided to abandon its planned upcoming games: Heavy Metal (a Transformers game), Hamlet, and two code-named projects Blue Sky and Snowball. This also has led to an 8 percent cut of its staff which will result in almost 100 jobs lost.
Before now, Niantic established itself in 2010 as part of Google before becoming independent in 2015. From that point on, it focused its efforts mainly on innovative augmented reality games. Its first major success came six years later with the launch of Pokemon GO which continues to be played globally year-round. Since then, they've tried to apply their AR tactics to a number of other properties to create the same spark. This includes Harry Potter: Wizards Unite in 2019, followed by both Pikmin Bloom and Catan World Explorers in 2021. Though each of these had a lot of brand recognition, both Catan and Wizards were shut down months after release with the latter done so to make room for Pikmin.
With Niantic having to cancel projects and lay off workers, the company is going through a hard time. Though they express hope with their latest projects NBA All-World and their virtual pet title Peridot, it's unknown how this will impact ongoing operations on other projects like Pokemon Go.
