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
Cecilia D'Anastasio / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
Peridot was supposed to prove Niantic could ship a second hit after Pokémon Go, but Bloomberg's report lands on negative app store reviews and few downloads — a familiar slide for a company whose flagship has shown declining DAUs and engagement since its 2016 launch peak. The piece frames it as a metaverse-games problem, and the corpus bears that out: Improbable's SpatialOS struggled for years to attract developers with only one game running on it, and Niantic itself was among the publishers whose NFT gaming bets flamed out in 2022 as that community turned niche and scam-filled.
What changed after the report is the arc's payoff: CEO John Hanke later confirmed Niantic sold its games business to Scopely for $3.5 billion, rebranded as Niantic Spatial, and pivoted to enterprise AI and digital mapping — effectively conceding that the consumer AR-games audience beyond Pokémon Go never materialized.
First-order effects
- Niantic loses its expansion thesis: with Peridot rejected by reviewers and download-starved, the company has no demonstrated second franchise to offset Pokémon Go's long engagement decay.
Second-order effects
- Scopely acquires Niantic's games business for $3.5 billion, gaining a combined audience of over 500 million players and taking on the live-operations burden Niantic no longer wants to carry.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across Improbable's SpatialOS, the 2022 NFT-games collapse, and Niantic's retreat suggests metaverse-adjacent consumer bets keep failing to find audiences, pushing capital toward live-service consolidation — buyers like Scopely acquiring proven player bases rather than new virtual-world platforms.
The trend: Metaverse-era game platforms are consolidating: original champions are selling their player bases to live-ops specialists and retreating to infrastructure plays like Niantic's mapping-and-AI pivot.