Pokemon Go is still running, and its ownership has completely changed. Niantic announced on March 12, 2025 that it was selling its entire games business to Scopely for $3.5 billion, and the deal closed on May 29, 2025. Niantic kept its geospatial technology, spinning it into a separate company called Niantic Spatial Inc. under founder John Hanke. In July 2026, timed to the game’s tenth anniversary, Scopely renamed the former Niantic games team Scopely Explore. Scopely itself has been owned since 2023 by Savvy Games Group, which is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. The game launched on July 6, 2016, and as of September 8, 2026 it is live, running seasonal events and publishing under the Scopely Explore name.
Everything below was checked against company sources on September 8, 2026. This is a subject where a great deal of confidently written material on the internet is now two owners out of date.
The Summer of 2016, Briefly
Pokemon Go was released on July 6, 2016 in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and rolled out elsewhere in waves because the servers could not take the load. The game’s own tenth anniversary post, published July 6, 2026 and read September 8, 2026, confirms the launch date.
What followed is the largest single mobile launch anyone had seen. Parks filled. Police forces issued advisories. Businesses paid to become lures. Contemporary reporting in 2019 put the game past one billion downloads.
The important structural fact from that period, and the one that explains the 2025 sale, is who made it. Niantic was not a games company that stumbled into maps. It was a mapping company that used games to collect map data, spun out of Google in 2015 with a location dataset built by players of its earlier game Ingress. Pokemon Go was the commercial engine on top of that.
Why Niantic Sold the Most Successful Part of Itself
This is the question people find genuinely confusing, and the answer is in Niantic’s own announcement.
Niantic’s post, Niantic’s Next Chapter, read September 8, 2026, sets out the structure. The games business, including Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, Monster Hunter Now and the companion apps Campfire and Wayfarer, went to Scopely. More than 400 people went with them, and the studio leadership stayed in place. Niantic retained the geospatial AI platform and refounded around it as Niantic Spatial Inc., led by John Hanke, funded with $250 million, of which $200 million came from Niantic’s own balance sheet and $50 million was invested by Scopely.
Read plainly, Niantic did not sell its games because they were failing. It sold them because it had decided the map was the company and the games were no longer the fastest way to build it. Running a global live service for a licensed franchise is enormously demanding, and none of that work advances a geospatial machine learning platform.
Scopely’s announcement of the deal is on its own newsroom, read September 8, 2026. The $3.5 billion transaction was announced March 12, 2025 and closed on May 29, 2025.
Who Owns It Now, in Full
The chain is three links long and each one is documented.
| The game | Pokemon Go, launched July 6, 2016 |
| Made and run by | Niantic, 2016 to May 2025 |
| Sold to | Scopely, deal announced March 12, 2025, closed May 29, 2025, $3.5 billion |
| Team renamed | Scopely Explore, announced July 6, 2026 |
| Scopely owned by | Savvy Games Group, which completed its $4.9 billion acquisition of Scopely in 2023 |
| Savvy owned by | The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia |
| The Pokemon rights | The Pokemon Company, which licenses them and is not part of any of this |
The last row is the one most often missed. Pokemon Go is a licensed product. Nintendo, Game Freak, Creatures and The Pokemon Company hold the underlying rights and none of them changed hands. Scopely bought the studio and the operating business, not Pokemon.
The Savvy Games Group acquisition of Scopely was completed in 2023 for $4.9 billion and is confirmed on the Public Investment Fund’s own newsroom, read September 8, 2026.
The Niantic Name Is Being Retired From the Game
If you opened Pokemon Go recently and noticed the branding had changed, this is why.
Scopely published Introducing Scopely Explore on July 6, 2026, read September 8, 2026. It describes Scopely Explore as a mission driven team inside Scopely rather than a separate company or subsidiary, covering Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, Monster Hunter Now, Campfire and Wayfarer. The post states that the Niantic name would begin to evolve across platforms to Scopely Explore over the following weeks.
Niantic the name still exists, but it now belongs to Niantic Spatial, a geospatial AI business that does not make Pokemon Go. Two different companies, one old name, and this is the single most common source of error in current writing about this game.
What Happened to Pokemon Go’s 2016 Craze
The 2016 phenomenon ended, and it ended for reasons that had nothing to do with the game being bad.
Novelty does not survive contact with weather. A game that requires you to walk outdoors has a seasonal ceiling and a geographic one. The northern hemisphere summer of 2016 was the best conditions the product would ever get.
The launch build was thin. In July 2016 there were no raids, no trading, no player versus player, and no reason to keep opening it once you had caught what was nearby. Almost everything that makes the game deep now was added later. The anniversary post lists raids, legendary Pokemon, friends and trading, trainer battles, GO Battle League, Mega Evolution and Dynamax as arriving between 2017 and 2024.
Most of the people who left were never players. They were participants in a cultural event. That is a different audience and it does not come back, in the same way that the people who bought a plastic guitar in 2008 were mostly not people who play music games.
The remaining audience is large, committed and quiet. Pokemon Go’s business has been carried since roughly 2018 by real world ticketed events, seasonal content and a core player base that plans its year around them. That produces steady revenue and almost no public conversation, which is why the game reads as over to anyone not playing it.
The same misreading applies to the other giant of mobile’s first decade. Rovio’s business changed completely without the games disappearing, which is the subject of what happened to Angry Birds. A franchise leaving the front page is not a franchise ending.
The Augmented Reality Promise That Did Not Arrive
Pokemon Go is usually described as the moment augmented reality went mainstream. Ten years later, that claim needs qualifying.
What went mainstream was a location based game with an optional camera mode that most serious players turn off because it drains the battery and makes catching harder. The genuinely ambitious AR, the kind where digital objects understand the geometry of the street you are standing on, is what Niantic kept when it sold the games. That is the entire point of Niantic Spatial.
So the honest reading is that the AR industry’s biggest consumer success was mostly not AR, and the company that built it has now separated the two things formally. It is a quieter version of the gap between what wearable computing promised and what it delivered, which we set out in what happened to Google Glass, another Google project from the same period that was sold as a change in how people would move through the world.
That framing, a device or app that would reorganize public space, has a poor record. The clearest earlier case is the machine that was going to redesign cities before it launched, covered in what happened to the Segway. Pokemon Go is the only member of that family that actually moved millions of people through streets, and it did it for one summer.
Niantic also shipped a companion wearable, the Pokemon Go Plus, a small Bluetooth device that let you catch without unlocking your phone. Bolting a single purpose gadget onto a successful app was a reflex of the mid 2010s, and most of those gadgets are now on the shelf described in our roundup of dead gadgets of the 2000s and 2010s.
Is Pokemon Go Still Worth Playing in 2026?
We do not give play advice, but we can state what is verifiably true on the day of writing.
The game is live. It marked its tenth anniversary on July 6, 2026 with a published post from the development team. It is running scheduled seasonal content into September 2026. It has a full progression system that did not exist at launch, including raids, battles, trading and friends.
The ownership questions are real and they are the reader’s to weigh: the studio is now part of a company owned by a Saudi sovereign wealth fund, and the founding team that built the game has largely moved to a different business. Those are facts about who runs it, not predictions about what they will do. We are not going to forecast the game’s future, because nobody outside Scopely can.
FAQ
Is Pokemon Go shutting down?
No. As of September 8, 2026 it is live and running scheduled events, and its team published a tenth anniversary post on July 6, 2026. No shutdown has been announced by Scopely or by The Pokemon Company.
Who owns Pokemon Go now?
Scopely, which acquired Niantic’s entire games business in a $3.5 billion deal announced March 12, 2025 and closed May 29, 2025. Scopely has been owned since 2023 by Savvy Games Group, which is owned by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. The Pokemon intellectual property itself remains with The Pokemon Company and was not part of the sale.
What happened to Niantic?
It split. The games and about 400 staff went to Scopely. The geospatial AI platform became a new company, Niantic Spatial Inc., led by founder John Hanke and funded with $250 million, including a $50 million investment from Scopely. Niantic still exists, but it no longer makes Pokemon Go.
What is Scopely Explore?
The new name for the former Niantic games team inside Scopely, announced on July 6, 2026. Scopely describes it as a team within the company rather than a separate subsidiary. It covers Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, Monster Hunter Now, Campfire and Wayfarer.
Why did Pokemon Go stop being popular?
It did not stop being played, it stopped being an event. The 2016 audience was largely people participating in a cultural moment rather than players, the launch version had very little to do beyond catching, and outdoor play is seasonal. The features that hold the current audience, including raids, trading and battles, all arrived after the craze had ended.
When did Pokemon Go come out?
July 6, 2016, first in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, with other countries following in waves because of server load.
The Short Version
- Launched July 6, 2016. Still live as of September 8, 2026.
- Niantic sold the entire games business to Scopely for $3.5 billion, announced March 12, 2025, closed May 29, 2025.
- Niantic kept the maps, refounding as Niantic Spatial Inc. under John Hanke with $250 million.
- The team was renamed Scopely Explore on July 6, 2026, and the Niantic name is being retired from the game.
- Scopely is owned by Savvy Games Group, which is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
- The Pokemon rights never moved. They remain with The Pokemon Company.
