Earlier this year, Pokémon Go maker Niantic announced it was selling its portfolio of mobile games to Monopoly Go owner Scopely for $3.5bn, in a move that was both celebrated and scorned by parts of the game’s devoted playerbase.
For some fans, new ownership finally meant freedom from previous owner Niantic’s focus on pushing largely unwanted augmented reality features into the game. (Post-sale, Niantic has essentially rebranded under a fresh title, Niantic Spatial, and made pursuing AR technology its sole goal.) Scopely, by comparison, is entirely gaming-focused.
But for other fans, particularly those who have played other Scopely titles, the change sparked concerns around the potential for increased monetisation, and of any involvement by Scopely’s parent company Savvy Games, which is a product of Saudi Arabia’s controversial Public Investment Fund.
As part of his first round of interviews since the $3.5bn acquisition was finalised earlier this month, I sat down with Pokémon Go director Michael Steranka to discuss the impact of the game changing hands, and what being owned by Scopely would really mean for fans of the hit smartphone game going forwards.
“We physically moved basically one block over so, you know, it wasn’t too much of a change,” Steranka begins, as we sit on Pokémon Go-branded deck chairs at the game’s big Go Fest 2025 live event in Paris last weekend. “It was actually one of our overflow offices that we had anyways, so a really familiar space.
“I would say the most remarkable thing about this transition so far is how uninterrupted it’s been,” he adds. “It’s very much been business as usual.”
For Pokémon Go, business as usual means a continually busy schedule of in-game events and additional Pokémon releases, as well as physical events such as Go Fest 2025 and the upcoming debut of a mysterious mobile event series, Pokémon Go Road Trip 2025, set to begin in the UK later this month and wrap up in Cologne in August. Throughout this, and through its acquisition period, Steranka says Pokémon Go has continued as normal — though it is, as he acknowledges, still early days.
“Granted, [the acquisition] fully closed during Osaka Go Fest, the team has been quite busy, and so it’s probably intentionally not disruptive around this moment in time,” he notes. “But the sense that I’ve been getting through all the conversations I’ve had with folks at Scopely is the way they operate is to be quite unintrusive with individual game teams.
“As you know, our full development team moved over with us, and in terms of the day to day, who we interact with, we all still ladder up to Ed Woo, our team’s leader within Niantic, who still is within Scopely as well.”
So, what will change? Let’s start with a positive for most Pokémon Go fans — the likely reduction in focus of AR-focused gameplay going forward.
“The key thing that’s maybe a little bit less of a priority is the augmented reality focus,” Steranka acknowledges. “It’s no secret a lot of players have not been super excited about some of the AR systems that have been added to the game over the years. Moving forward, if we add any AR functionality to Pokémon Go, it’ll be because we as a team really believe it’s going to be a fun and exciting thing to add.”
Unlike Niantic, Scopely is a company entirely dedicated to video games — something Steranka perhaps tellingly describes as a “breath of fresh air” for his own team.
“Philosophically it’s great, or I’m expecting it to be great, to be at a company that’s fully dedicated to games, because that’s where I feel like we did struggle a little bit over on the Niantic side,” he says. “It’s just when it comes to overall company priorities, and where do we want to invest, and what sort of company initiatives we’re pushing forward at Scopely, it’ll be very much focused on what’s best for this game. And I think that’ll be a nice breath of fresh air for everybody.”
Despite recent changes to increase the amount of in-game features available to fans playing remotely, and the introduction of new items such as the Lucky Trinket and the pricey upcoming Golden Bottle Cap, Steranka says players are simply seeing the Pokémon Go team’s own roadmap of features, planned months in advance, go live.
“It’s kind of funny, because I think some of the recent changes we’ve made in the game have been things that players have been hoping for and wanting for a while, and a lot of online chatter that I’ve seen has been suspicion that, like, ‘Oh, this is this must be because of the Scopely acquisition’,” Steranka says. “These are things we’ve been working on.
“But to be fair, Scopely hasn’t come in and said, ‘Hey, don’t do that.’ They’ve very much come in and been very supportive of all the things that we had already been planning on the roadmap. We’ve got a couple other amazing features and updates coming down the line later this year that players will be equally thrilled to see.”
Indeed, in terms of the game’s plans for the future, and the suggestion that any new owner might come in and start adding new things to Pokémon Go’s existing content schedule, Steranka says the Pokémon Go team already has “pretty much planned out for the next two years, essentially, though that does change over time as well.”
Shortly after the sale was first announced, Steranka sat down for a lengthy heart to heart with TrainerTips, perhaps the best-known and longest standing Pokémon Go player on YouTube, for an insightful interview that aimed to soothe initial fan fears over the game’s future. Months later, and with the deal now done, I ask Steranka where he thought community sentiment towards the game and its new ownership stood now.
“I think people who are skeptical will remain skeptical,” Steranka replies. “The biggest thing that we can do is just prove over time that this actually is a great direction for the game to go. But I do think that, especially after having that interview with TrainerTips, I’ve definitely seen people have a little bit more optimism for the future. It’s healthy skepticism, but optimistic, regardless. So that’s how I feel personally.
“I’ve heard great things about Scopely. I think actions will speak louder than words, but so far, the actions have been awesome, and I have every expectation that that’s going to continue over the coming years.”
Still, alongside this enthusiasm, I was keen to ask about the match-up between Niantic’s now-separate Pokémon Go team and the Savvy Games-owned Scopely. In the past, Pokémon Go has frequently positioned itself as an inclusive game run by progressive leadership. I asked Steranka what the internal conversations were like around being owned, ultimately, by a Saudi-backed company, and what it might mean for the game going forward.
“That was definitely something I was curious about personally early on when I met with Walter Driver, the co-CEO and founder of Scopely,” Steranka acknowledges. “I did address that head on with him, and his perspective on that really resonated with me.
“Number one, [the Pokémon Go] team is pretty much never gonna be engaging directly with Savvy. For the most part, they just let Scopely operate the way that they want to operate. Number two, it’s always better to engage with people of all different kinds of backgrounds. And if there’s any change that you’d like to make in the world, you can’t really make any changes by not engaging, right?
“And I think that actually is very, sort of central to our philosophy around Pokémon Go as a game as well. We want people to go out and meet with other folks in their community and fully believe in the power of getting face to face and finding common ground and bettering the world from that type of community-first approach.
“So yeah, I don’t think there’s going to be any major or any changes at all that is dictated down on high, from Savvy, and if anything it just means we have the funding needed to invest in areas that we’ve always wanted to invest in. And so that’s something I’ve really been excited about, because there is a world where maybe we became a public company, and then we’re at the scrutiny of shareholder demands on a quaterly basis. That’s not really a world we’re operating in within at Scopely, which is great. It can be a lot more focused on what’s best for the long term health of the game.”
Earlier this year, SNK, another Saudi-backed company, raised eyebrows by including European football star Cristian Ronaldo in its new game Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, as Ronaldo himself cemented himself within the Saudi football leagues.
“I did see that,” Steranka says, when I bring this up.
I guess what you’re saying is, don’t expect Ronaldo in Pokémon Go anytime soon, I ask.
“Definitely not,” is Steranka’s reply. “Yeah, that’s a little bit not our vibe within Pokémon Go.”
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
