A Saudi Arabian company that was created by the Saudi Arabian government just purchased Pokémon Go, the most popular augmented reality game of all time, with a collective worldwide player base of more than 100 million people and their locations in the real world.
Niantic is selling Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now to Scopely, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Saudi Arabian company called Savvy Games, which itself is owned by the Saudi Arabian government’s Public Investment Fund. Scopely, Niantic, and Savvy Games have collectively published six separate blog posts about the $3.85 billion deal, none of which specifically address what is happening with the location data of Pokémon Go’s 100 million players and none of which address how location data collected in the future will be handled under Scopely and its Saudi Arabian owners.
Two other apps, called Campfire and Wayfarer, are also part of the deal. Campfire is a tool that lets people meet up in the real world to play Pokémon Go (or other Niantic games) together, and Wayfarer is an app that specifically leverages the players of Niantic games to map real-world locations for Pokémon Go. Niantic will keep Ingress, its first augmented reality game, and another game called Peridot.
Niantic said that a knock-on effect of this massive deal is that it will be spinning off its nascent AI mapping business, which was using Pokémon Go data to create a “large geospatial model,” into a separate company called Niantic Spatial. Notably, Scopely is a new investor in the Niantic Spatial, which suggests an ongoing relationship between Niantic and Scopely, and an interest from Scopely in the use of Pokémon Go user data to create an AI mapping business. The companies’ collective blogs make it seem like Niantic Spatial—a data business—is going to become a totally separate entity, but Scopely’s direct, $50 million investment in it suggests that monetizing Pokémon Go players’ location data and AR camera scanning data is very much still part of the plan.
What is happening here, then, is that an already very complicated and vast location data ecosystem that was previously controlled by only one American company (Niantic) has now become a far more complicated location data ecosystem controlled by an “American” company that is wholly owned by a Saudi Arabian conglomerate whose largest shareholder is the Saudi Arabian government. Pokémon Go and all of the games Niantic is selling to Scopely require a player’s location in order to work at all, and Pokémon Go is partially monetized with in-game, location-targeted ads.
There is no world in which Scopely does not collect players’ locations moving forward. But what remains unclear is what is going to happen with location data moving forward and what is going to happen with historic location data.
None of this is explained to users in any of the many blog posts about this deal, but Ed Wu, who leads the Pokémon Go team, called it a “partnership” with Scopely, and Scopely’s blog post says they are “teaming up” with Niantic. It remains very unclear whether there will be any ongoing relationship between Scopely and Niantic and whether it includes any data sharing, what will happen to data that Scopely collects, how it will be monetized, and how and if it will flow to Savvy Games or the Public Investment Fund.
This opacity is unfortunately par for the course when it comes to the monetization of any user data and, especially, location data collected through apps. As Joseph has reported numerous times, it is essentially impossible for any single person to track how their location is being collected and who it is being sold to and what it is being used for after it has been collected.
Niantic and Scopely did not respond to a request for comment about whether there would be ongoing data sharing and what would happen to historic location data collected from these games.
