Niantic Shutting Down Harry Potter: Wizards Unite

The provided text details a significant strategic shift for Niantic, transitioning from a mobile game developer to a geospatial artificial intelligence firm. This transformation is marked by the 2025 sale of its gaming business to Scopely for $3.5 billion. The acquisition includes major titles such as Pokémon GO, which maintains over 20 million weekly active users, Monster Hunter Now, and Pikmin Bloom. Collectively, these assets generated over $1 billion in annual revenue in 2024 and currently serve more than 30 million monthly active users.

This divestment follows a history of portfolio optimization, notably the 2021 shutdown of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. That title struggled to gain traction, accumulating only 20.3 million downloads and $39.4 million in lifetime revenue, figures that were eclipsed by the sustained, multi-billion-dollar success of Pokémon GO. The sale to Scopely allows Niantic to focus its resources on the newly formed entity, Niantic Spatial.

Supported by $250 million in capital, Niantic Spatial will pivot toward developing Large Geospatial Models. By leveraging a proprietary database of over 30 billion images, the company aims to create navigation and engagement solutions for sectors including logistics, manufacturing, and tourism. While Niantic will retain operation of Ingress Prime and Peridot, the core of its future business model is now centered on integrating extended reality and geographic information systems to help machines and humans better understand the physical world.