‘Pokemon Go’ dev Niantic raises £225million for “real-world metaverse”

The verse is yet to come

Niantic has revealed that it has raised roughly £225million ($300million USD) from Coatue, which has raised the company value to roughly £6.73billion ($9billion USD).

The Pokemon Go developer has previously come out against the idea of the metaverse, with founder and CEO John Hanke saying it was a “dystopian nightmare” in August.

“At Niantic, we believe humans are the happiest when their virtual world leads them to a physical one,” Hanke said in the recent post. “Unlike a sci-fi metaverse, a real-world metaverse will use technology to improve our experience of the world as we’ve known it for thousands of years.”

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Credit: Niantic

“Niantic is building a platform for AR based on a 3D map of the world that we believe will play a critical role in the next transition in computing,” said Matt Mazzeo, a general partner at Coatue. “We are excited to partner with Niantic because we see this infrastructure supporting a metaverse for the real world and helping to power the next evolution of the internet.” he continued.

Earlier in November Niantic announced that Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is to close down on January 31, 2022.

The game, which is a take on the wildly successful Pokemon Go formula, set in the wizarding world of Harry Potter, was released in June of 2019. A statement on its website from “The Harry Potter: Wizards Unite Team”, reads:

“Today we’re announcing that Harry Potter: Wizards Unite will officially close on January 31, 2022. The game will be removed from the App Store, Google Play and Galaxy Store on December 6, 2021, and players will no longer be able to make in-game purchases as of December 6, 2021.”

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Elsewhere, Xbox has created a virtual museum for its 20th anniversary. It’s filled with memorabilia of both the good and bad parts of the platform’s history, and even has a screen showing off stats for each player, like their most played game of all time and more.

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