Michael Steranka, senior product director on mobile smash hit Pokémon Go, has told Polygon that the game being sold to Saudi-owned Scopely is “actually great.” News of the sale last week understandably led to a lot of concern among fans, especially since Scopely also owns the extraordinarily monetized Monopoly Go. But Steranka claims the same ad-riddled fate doesn’t await the Pokémon catching mobile game, “not now, not ever.”
How a person takes Steranka’s remarks is going to be heavily dictated by their view of the state of Pokémon Go in 2025. The developer told Polygon that over the months he’s been chatting with the people at Scopely, “I’ve come to really find that they share so many of the same values that we’ve held near and dear to us at Niantic in terms of really caring about the player communities that they’ve fostered through their various games.” Which, for those who would argue POGO has perhaps not entirely looked out for its communities at every opportunity, might not read as intended.
Steranka continues, adding that there are “also lots of shared values on how to operate within a team and caring about the people on the teams as well.” In 2023, despite POGO alone having generated over $6 billion in lifetime revenue, Niantic laid off 230 employees.
This leads Steranka to conclude that Scopely will allow them to “be able to continue to operate Pokémon Go the same way we always have, with the same practices that we always have, and evolve the game in the way that we’ve always envisioned wanting to do.”
One aspect that Niantic is emphatic about is that POGO won’t be receiving interruptive adverts or restricted time mechanics. Given the game has made umpteen billions, the former is clearly unnecessary to be profitable (at the moment, at least), while the latter would fundamentally break the game.
There was a reply that struck me as more troubling, when Polygon asked about concerns that user data would now be owned by another company, that is owned—as the site rather delicately put it—by “a different country.” Instead of addressing this, Steranka responded that Niantic does not sell data to third parties “full stop.” But this of course isn’t relevant when it will be the Saudi regime, via its “Public Investment Fund” (of which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is the chairman), that owns the data outright. Steranka said, “So if there are any fears that this is going to other places that you may or may not know or may or may not trust, I hope that what I’m sharing today can help quell any of those fears.” Well, no.
Of course, all of Steranka’s assurances fail to recognize that the game is already an absolute cluster of monetization that’s only gotten worse and worse over the years. But the response also ignores something that strikes me as far more important: that the monetization is now directly funding a regime described by Human Rights Watch as deliberately making investments like paying $3.5 billion for Pokémon Go “to whitewash the country’s abysmal human rights record.”
Saudi Arabia is on the receiving end of damning assessments from Amnesty International, while Freedom House states that its citizens are “not free.” It’s the only government in the world that still carries out beheadings, and it practices unfair trials and torture, has authority control over all press, has no free speech, and LGBTQ people can face the death penalty. And under its recently reformed “women’s rights”, women still have to have a male guardian’s permission to get married, have to “obey” their husbands, and are required by law not to “abstain from sexual relations.”
It seems like the sort of thing that ought to matter.
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