Despite ownership of Saudi Arabia’s PIF, Pokémon GO lead claims the game won’t become invested in advertisements

With the sale of Niantic’s gaming division to Scopely, the PIF-backed gaming sector of Savvy Games, there have been concerns that the future of Pokémon GO would become wrought with new forms of invasive advertising and data collection. While we still can’t rule out some sort of biometric collection going on in the background, Pokémon GO lead Michael Steranka recently told Polygon that the sale of the game to Scopely was “actually great.” He also stressed that in-game ads won’t be infesting the application anytime soon.

When questioned about intrusive ads potentially being added to Pokémon GO, Steranka said, “If there’s one takeaway that I would love for people to have from this conversation, it’s that definitively no… We will not be building into our games any type of obtrusive ads or anything like that.” He stressed that Scopely doesn’t feel that would be right for Pokémon Go and that, overall, the company wants to continue to foster the community that has built up around the application.

 

 

When pressed about the selling of user data to any third parties, Steranka also denied that would be happening. “We do not sell player data to third parties, full stop,” he said. “We only leverage location data to operate the game, and we store any location data needed to operate the game on U.S.-based servers, and we follow all of the incredibly strict regulatory best practices to protect that data as best as we can.”

Now, if you take these words at face value, it does seem like Scopely will be guiding Pokémon GO in the right direction. Sadly, you’re still giving money to the Saudi Prince and it’s not like the current state of monetization in the game is particularly good. The game has long since become overrun with monetization and while it’s nice there won’t be intrusive ads, I think the ship has sailed on the game shying away from money-grubbing.

 

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