At the beginning of the week, the studio Niantic, the creator of the worldwide mobile hit, presented Pokémon GO, a new augmented reality game NBA All-World. The studio hasn't had more success in recent years (title Harry Potter: Wizards Unite from 2019, he didn't follow up on the success of Pokémon GO), so now he hopes to succeed with NBA All-World. The fact that Niantic is not experiencing the best of times has now been confirmed by the Bloomberg agency, according to which the studio has canceled several upcoming games and is preparing to lay off some employees.
According to Bloomberg Niantic has canceled four upcoming games and plans to lay off roughly 85-90 employees, or about 8% . Its boss, John Hanke, told the agency that the studio was "going through economic turmoil" and that it had already "cut costs in various areas." He added that the company needed "further streamlining of operations to best weather the economic storms that may come."
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The canceled projects were the titles Heavy Metal, Hamlet, Blue Sky and Snowball, with the former announced a year ago and the latter Niantic working with British theater company Punchdrunk, behind the popular interactive game Sleep No More. The Niantic studio was founded in 2010 and is mainly known for augmented reality games that combine digital interfaces with real images captured by players' cameras. In 2016, the studio released the Pokémon Go title, which was downloaded by more than a billion people and became a literal cultural phenomenon. However, it has not yet been able to follow up on this huge success. Whether the company can pull it off with NBA All-World is the million dollar question.
