Who owns Pokémon GO now? The Niantic-Scopely deal, explained

In March 2025, Niantic announced the sale of its entire games division to the mobile publisher Scopely. The deal was valued at approximately $3.5 billion. Four games changed hands:

• Pokémon GO, the AR catching game that defined the genre in 2016
• Monster Hunter Now, the Capcom collaboration
• Pikmin Bloom, the casual walking game
• Ingress, Niantic's original faction-based territory game

The sale was widely covered at the time, including by Engadget and 404 Media. If you play any of these four games, your account changed owners with them.

"Scopely bought it" is only the first link. Scopely itself is owned by Savvy Games Group, and Savvy Games Group is owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. Savvy is part of a multi-billion-dollar PIF gaming investment program under the Vision 2030 initiative. Here is the full chain for each game:

To be clear: a sovereign wealth fund owning a games publisher is not unusual, and ownership alone proves nothing about how data is handled. The chain above is simply the factual answer to "who owns Pokémon GO".

Two things are documented and worth knowing. First: player accounts transferred with the games. You did not need to sign up again, your account simply has a new owner. Second: the associated location data history transferred too. Games like Pokémon GO and Ingress record where you played, and that history is part of what changed hands. Techdirt covered exactly this aspect of the deal.

Since the sale, your data is governed by the new owner's privacy policy. That is the factual situation. There is no evidence of any misuse, and we are not claiming any. The honest summary is simpler: the company that holds years of your location history is a different company than the one you originally agreed to share it with.

None of this requires panic. It does reward five minutes of housekeeping:

1. Read the current privacy policy. Not the 2016 one you clicked through. The one that applies now, under the new owner.
2. Request a data export. You can ask for a copy of the data held about you. Depending on where you live, laws like the GDPR make this a legal right.
3. Request deletion if you no longer play. An abandoned account still carries your full location history. If you quit years ago, deleting it costs you nothing.
4. Check your in-game privacy settings. Review what is shared publicly and what permissions the app holds on your phone.
5. Look at alternatives. If the ownership question bothers you, the next section lists several options, including, full disclosure, our own.

If you want GPS gaming without the Scopely ownership chain, you have real choices. An honest list:

Credibility beats pitch: all four are legitimate options, and the right one depends on whether you want treasure hunting, zone tagging, RPG depth or persistent territory. We obviously hope you try ours, but any of them gets you out the door.