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Pokémon Go
GRTV News - Mobile gaming giant Scopely buys Niantic's gaming division for $3.5 billion
The Pokemon GO developer has been officially bought out.
Audio transcription
"Hello there, welcome back to GRTV News, I'm Alex as usual covering the afternoons, latest and greatest when it comes to gaming, technology, entertainment, whatever you like and indeed whatever you love, we always have it here for you at GRTV News and in the wider Gamereactor network as the whole."
"So if you like what you see and you want to see more, be sure to check out Gamereactor wherever you get it from for more gaming reviews, gaming previews, movie reviews, series reviews, exclusives, interviews, sports, world news and of course so much more.
Without further ado, today we're talking the buyout of Niantic, so if you're not aware Niantic currently is the developer or Niantic's game division is the developer behind Pokemon Go, Monster Hunter Now, Monopoly Go and Pikmin Bloom as well as a few other titles that have been massively popular, of course Pokemon Go being the huge main attraction here, especially for Bioscopely which is a Saudi Arabia funded sort of mobile games conglomerate I guess you'd call it, which is currently looking at buying and purchasing a lot of high profile game developers, specifically Niantic and a few weeks ago we reported that Scopely was interested in the buyout and now it seems the buyout is going through for the price of 3.5 billion dollars USD."
"So that is a huge amount of money and we're not sure what it'll exactly mean for the future as the deal's just gone through, it's a bit like when we reported on the Activision Blizzard buyout from Xbox, although that was for multiple amounts more considering that deal was about 70 billion I believe, but again once the deal's just been announced we're not exactly sure what that immediately means for these games but they will be coming under new ownership basically."
"We do have a statement from Tim O'Brien, Chief Revenue Officer and Board Member of Scopely, Scopely has always been focused on cultivating meaningful communities through a shared love of play and the Niantic Games organisation is one of the best in the world at this endeavour.
We're extremely inspired by what the team has built over the last decade, delivering innovative experiences that captivate a vast, enduring global audience and get people out in the real world."
"We look forward to further accelerating the team's creativity through our partnership." So that all sounds very good and very business acumen-y but it's likely that we're going to see maybe some big changes but considering how successful Niantic already is with its traditional formula with Pokemon Go, Monsanto now, again as Tim O'Brien there says, getting people out into the real world as well as getting them to play games was a really, really innovative idea in itself and it helped sort of develop those ideas of what mobile games can be and how they can also encourage people to do more than just sit at their home and twiddle with their phone, which was a bit of a tongue twister there for me for some weird reason."
"But in any case, Niantic's buyer, I can't see it being something that's going to massively, massively change the company.
I don't think they're going to switch and suddenly go, actually we're scrapping Pokemon Go because these things make money and why would you buy a company if you don't want to shut down how it makes, if you want to shut down how it makes its money."
"In any case, I can't really see this going anywhere apart from just Niantic expanding on what it already does.
Perhaps there's going to be some more franchises it'll look at.
Again they've dealt with Harry Potter before, they've dealt with Monster Hunter before as I said."
"Monopoly, Pikmin, these are big, big names within the gaming space already and they're just emboldened even further by these Niantic games.
So we'll have to see what comes from it.
But do you think it's exciting news, are you a bit worried by Niantic's game division being bought out?
Let me know all that and more and I'll see you tomorrow for some more GRTV news, goodbye."
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