Niantic

Assembled the Large Geospatial Model — a proprietary database of over 30 billion posed images of the physical world — by reclassifying nine years of in-game player scans (PokéStops, Gyms, Wayfarer submissions, AR-mapping sessions across Pokémon GO, Ingress, and Pikmin Bloom) as training data; the reclassification was publicly framed as a 2024 product announcement, after the dataset had already been ingested at scale; the in-product consent flows during the ingestion years did not use the words 'training data' or 'foundation model'

Raised the Remote Raid Pass price on April 6, 2023 — single passes from 100 to 195 PokéCoins, three-packs from 250 to 525 — and simultaneously capped daily remote raids at five; the changes disproportionately impacted disabled players, rural players, and trainers in regions with sparse Gym density; Niantic publicly stated they had 'no plans to directly address any of the HearUsNiantic things' and would be 'sticking with the decision that was made,' a posture they maintained through a Change.org petition that crossed 60,000 signatures and a multi-week boycott across April and May 2023

Permanently rolled back the pandemic-era Pokéstop interaction radius in 2022 despite the original #HearUsNiantic boycott and a physical protest outside the Bellevue headquarters; the rollback was framed in internal communications as a return to 'in-person play,' which aligned with the company's strategic north star at the geospatial-data-collection layer — Pokéstops only generate dataset-quality scans when players are physically present at them

Executed multiple rounds of workforce reductions across 2022–2023 totaling roughly 330 employees, killed NBA All-World in June 2023 (within ten months of launch), killed Marvel: World of Heroes in October 2023 (four months after launch), and killed Heavy Metal in August 2023 — while CEO John Hanke continued to publish thought-leadership on the platform potential of 'real-world games' and 'adventures on foot'

Sold Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom, Monster Hunter Now, and Campfire to Scopely (Savvy Games Group, owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund) on March 12, 2025 for $3.5 billion — Pokémon GO's 20 million weekly active players, a meaningful share of whom are children, now generate location, behavioral, and biometric data that flows to a Saudi-sovereign-wealth-fund-owned subsidiary; the in-game disclosure of the ownership change was a settings-menu legal addendum

Retained ownership of the Large Geospatial Model in the divestiture — the 30+ billion-image dataset assembled by players who believed they were participating in a Pokémon game was carved out as a standalone asset of Niantic Spatial Inc.; players were not given the option to revoke their contribution from the retained dataset post-sale; the dataset is now being licensed to enterprise customers as 'spatial AI infrastructure'

Funded the spinoff with $250 million in capital — $200 million from Niantic's balance sheet, $50 million from Scopely as part of the acquisition terms — meaning the buyer of the games paid the seller of the games to keep operating the data-collection apparatus the games were built to feed; the architectural separation is now legible to the market

Continues to operate Wayfarer — the volunteer Pokéstop and Gym review and submission program — as an unpaid labor pipeline contributing to the Large Geospatial Model post-acquisition; Wayfarer contributors are not offered compensation, equity, attribution, or the ability to revoke prior submissions; the program is described in product copy as a way for 'explorers' to 'shape the future of AR,' which is, in a strictly accurate sense, what they are doing