Niantic Acquires Ex-Magic Leap Developers; Ready Player Me Inks Adidas Avatar Deal

Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders, one of the AR games NZXR staffers helped create. Credit: Weta Workshop/Magic Leap.

It hasn’t even been a month since Niantic’s last acquisition, but the AR juggernaut is growing yet again. The Pokemon Go makers are acquiring NZXR, a New Zealand-based AR game development team. NZXR joins a list of recent Niantic purchases that includes 8th Wall, Lowkey, Hoss and Scaniverse. Niantic hasn’t disclosed the price for any of these deals, so still we have no idea how much money it is spending.

All of Niantic’s recent acquisitions should certainly serve to help bolster its development platform, Lightship, which could see the company become a much bigger force in AR beyond its popular games. NZXR, for instance, has worked on a toolset of its own called StoryXR that could be incorporated into Lightship.