Ingress developer Niantic Labs is no longer a Google company following Alphabet shakeup

Google had a major overhaul this week as it is now a subsidiary of the newly formed Alphabet, Inc., but one company is actually spinning off completely from this new corporate infrastructure.

Niantic Labs, which is the developer responsible for creating the massively multiplayer geocaching game Ingress, is now its own, independent company, according to a post on Google+ (via Tech Crunch). Ingress is a game where people use their smartphone’s positioning system to faux-hack real places around the world. For example, two teams (that comprise all of the game’s hundreds of thousands of players) fight over control of landmarks like the Rocky statue in Philadelphia or the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia (and I’m having a hard time thinking of decent landmarks outside of Philadelphia for some reason).