‘Pokémon Go’ developer Niantic is laying off 230 employees

engadget.com:

Niantic is joining the long list of companies laying off employees. The studio published an “organizational update” (after the internal memo was leaked to Kotaku) announcing that it would let go of 230 employees. In addition, the company is shutting down its Los Angeles studio and canceling two licensed games: NBA All-World and Marvel: World of Heroes. The only good news for fans is that Pokémon Go, still its flagship product, will live to fight another day.

“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,” wrote CEO John Hanke. “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.”

Although nobody likes hearing about layoffs, Hanke’s letter seems forthcoming and candid about the company’s challenges and the mistakes he and the leadership team made. He attributes the downsizing to the studio growing its expenses faster than its revenue. “In the wake of the revenue surge we saw during Covid, we grew our headcount and related expenses in order to pursue growth more aggressively, expanding existing game teams, our AR platform work, new game projects and roles that support our products and our employees. Post Covid, our revenue returned to pre-Covid levels and new projects in games and platform have not delivered revenues commensurate with those investments.” The CEO expects the reductions to “bring expenses and revenue back into line” without shuttering its most valuable property.

On that topic, Hanke said, “The top