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Niantic sets up $10 million third-party developer fund and names first dev contest winner

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Niantic has scored hundreds of millions of players and billions of dollars in revenue from games like Pokémon Go. And now it is using the learnings from those games to make its platform available to third-party developers. And it is setting up a $10 million fund to invest in interesting location-based and augmented reality projects that use its platform.

The Niantic Real World Platform runs the augmented reality and location-based features of titles like Pokémon Go, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, and Ingress. CEO John Hanke said at a press briefing this week that while Niantic is working on more internally produced games, there are plenty of other opportunities that Niantic itself won’t go after.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.