Niantic in crisis? The developer cancels 4 upcoming projects while laying off 8% of their staff

Seems like the company is going through a very rough patch

Niantic in crisis? The developer cancels 4 upcoming projects while laying off 8% of their staff

Seems like the company is going through a very rough patch

Things are not going well for Niantic and sadly many people will suffer from this bad streak. According to Bloomberg, the company is struggling to find their next big hit and in the meantime, they are looking to cut costs.

What does this mean? For starters, the gaming company cancelled four upcoming projects and will cut about 85 to 90 jobs or which is the same, 8% of their workforce.

In the words of Niantic Chief Executive Officer John Hanke the company is “facing a time of economic turmoil” and had already been “reducing costs in a variety of areas.”

Which projects are canceled?

The scraped projects include Heavy Metal, a Transformers game that Niantic announced last year, and Hamlet, a collaboration between Niantic and Punchdrunk, the theatrical company behind the popular interactive play Sleep No More. The other two projects were called Blue Sky and Snowball.

You may be wondering, how a company with a successful title like Pokémon GO is struggling with money? Well, that is exactly the problem, Niantic hasn’t been able to replicate Pokémon GO success.

Going through a fail streak, the last one; was the 2019 Harry Potter: Wizards Unite game, which failed to find an audience and shut down earlier this year. Games based on the board game Catan and the Nintendo series Pikmin were also unsuccessful.

Hopefully, things change soon for the company, for now, they have announced a partnership with the National Basketball Association for a game called NBA All-World which with luck will be their next big game.

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