After Niantic's latest AR game Peridot got negative app store reviews and few downloads, a look at the company's metaverse games struggling to find an audience
Just a few years ago, tech evangelists were hailing Niantic Inc., the maker of the hit game Pokémon Go … Tweets: @cecianasta , @345triangle , @harrymccracken , @joonian , and @hermesninja Tweets: Cecilia D'Anastasio / @cecianasta : New: Metaverse evangelists said Pokemon Go maker Niantic was proof the mainstream wants AR. But Niantic has struggled to produce a hit, with many of its games cancelled or unpopular. Players of its new game Peridot complain they'd like to toggle off AR. https://www.bloomberg.com/... Sam Byford / @345triangle : these metaverse evangelists should try actually using the products they evangelise, or at least asking people who do. i still play pokemon go (i know) but its “AR” functionality has always been a tangential gimmick that everyone turns off https://twitter.com/... Harry McCracken / @harrymccracken : Some interesting details here, but is an App Store average rating of 4.2 a bad sign? https://www.bloomberg.com/... Wong Joon Ian / @joonian : it was the pokemon IP that made it a hit, not the AR https://twitter.com/... Sue / @hermesninja : Is the customer always right? Well, perhaps not always. But most of the time we're spot on... Yet some companies choose to live w/in their own bubble, so enamored with their own mission that they choose to shut out legitimate feedback. 🤷♀️ #HearUsNiantic https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Niantic has spent seven years trying to prove Pokémon Go wasn't a fluke. At launch, CEO John Hanke pitched the game as a way to nudge players outdoors to exercise and explore — a mission framing that made the company the poster child for consumer AR. By 2020, COO Megan Quinn was laying out plans to open Pokémon Go's underlying tech to other developers alongside Qualcomm AR reference hardware, betting Niantic could become the platform layer for the metaverse.
Bloomberg's report lands at the low point of that arc: Peridot, the latest attempt, drew negative App Store reviews and few downloads, with players asking to toggle off the very AR the product exists to showcase. It confirms a pattern the evangelists' pitch ignored — beyond one 2016 phenomenon, Niantic's slate of cancelled and unpopular titles never found a second audience.
First-order effects
- Peridot's player feedback inverts Niantic's core premise: users want less AR, not more, making the technology the friction point rather than the draw.
- The flop adds another title to Niantic's record of cancelled or unpopular games, leaving the company publicly dependent on a single aging hit.
Second-order effects
- The developer-platform bet from the Quinn era loses its anchor: third parties have little reason to license tech from a company that cannot demonstrate a second successful consumer title of its own.
- App Store review signals become the public scoreboard for the consumer-metaverse thesis, raising the bar for any publisher pitching AR-native gameplay to investors and platform holders.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds to its conclusion, consumer AR gaming consolidates around whoever owns the breakout IP rather than around platform builders — the endpoint visible in Hanke's later move to sell the games business and pivot Niantic back toward mapping and enterprise AI.
The trend: Consumer AR gaming built on Pokémon Go's outsized 2016 success is giving way to enterprise and infrastructure pivots, as even its flagship champion fails to produce a second mainstream hit.