Saudi Investment Fund pays $3.5bn to capture Pokémon Go

[Kaz]

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Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) will pay $3.5bn (£2.7bn) to buy the gaming division of developer Niantic, whose titles include the hit mobile game Pokémon Go.

The game involves players walking around in the real world to hunt the collectable creatures, which appear on their phone screens using augmented reality.

Despite launching almost a decade ago, Pokémon Go is still amongst the highest-grossing mobile games in the world, with 30 million monthly players.

The deal marks the latest step by Saudi Arabia to develop its gaming industry, which it has spent billions of pounds on in recent years.

Niantic's other games, such as Monster Hunter Now and Pikmin Bloom, are also included in the acquisition, along with the people employed to make them.

 

Saudi Investment Fund pays $3.5bn to capture Pokémon Go

WWW.BBC.COM

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It is amongst the highest-grossing mobile games in the world, with 30 million monthly players.

Niantic was also working on location tracking and identification based on pictures, so there may be some military intelligence use behind the scenes...

 

Locate — Niantic Spatial Platform

WWW.NIANTICSPATIAL.COM

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Seamless AR integration powered by the most advanced geospatial models designed to process and understand data about the physical...

 

But the real question is, how much would you pay to capture that Pokemon?!