Sure but they’re just buying a licensed property with a declining player base and leaving Niantic with the base tech and the drive to innovate. It’s a dead end road where they’re buying the “secure” part of the company but it’s actually incredibly high risk because of how licensing agreements work. That’s why I call it dead tech. They’re not going to build anything out of it. It’ll just decline. Perhaps quite catastrophically at that.
they need to branch out from thier dying, single industry, oil. they have been lapping up sports teams all over. turns out the desert is not a good place to live with little to no natural resources outside of oil. also being desert theres little to no arable land.
You give them too much credit on this one. This decision was likely spearheaded by some nepo appointment who is out to diversify in the worst way. When your send cousin Johnny to college in the West, you’re still not getting the best and brightest when he comes back. Whole structure of their investment fund is graft and bad decisions.
Compare Saudis system to Norway’s sovereign fund. Instead of being politically neutral, like everything in the house of Saud it’s a patronage system. They do big headline buys like this to convince everybody above them they’re actually doing something to diversify from oil market shocks. But in this case they’re buying a dry well that’s already had it’s data sold to those who wanted it and is burdened to IP licensing that likely drains much of its micro transaction potential while also being able to be revoked if the parent company stops liking what they’re doing. They’re not going to get much from a state security standpoint from it that they couldn’t get in ways that would cost several billion less and they’re not going to get much of a return of investment on it either. But since patronage rewards are front loaded they do stupid buys like this.
If they just wanted the data, they could’ve gotten it for much less than 3.8 billion. They likely could’ve gotten it for 3.7 billion less at least. Or just send some guys to steal it like they did with Twitter back in the day. Much cheaper.
Saudi Arabia really likes to invest in dead tech.
Dead tech so many people play Pokemon go.
Sure but they’re just buying a licensed property with a declining player base and leaving Niantic with the base tech and the drive to innovate. It’s a dead end road where they’re buying the “secure” part of the company but it’s actually incredibly high risk because of how licensing agreements work. That’s why I call it dead tech. They’re not going to build anything out of it. It’ll just decline. Perhaps quite catastrophically at that.
they need to branch out from thier dying, single industry, oil. they have been lapping up sports teams all over. turns out the desert is not a good place to live with little to no natural resources outside of oil. also being desert theres little to no arable land.
They don’t care about the tech, they care about the data.
You give them too much credit on this one. This decision was likely spearheaded by some nepo appointment who is out to diversify in the worst way. When your send cousin Johnny to college in the West, you’re still not getting the best and brightest when he comes back. Whole structure of their investment fund is graft and bad decisions.
Compare Saudis system to Norway’s sovereign fund. Instead of being politically neutral, like everything in the house of Saud it’s a patronage system. They do big headline buys like this to convince everybody above them they’re actually doing something to diversify from oil market shocks. But in this case they’re buying a dry well that’s already had it’s data sold to those who wanted it and is burdened to IP licensing that likely drains much of its micro transaction potential while also being able to be revoked if the parent company stops liking what they’re doing. They’re not going to get much from a state security standpoint from it that they couldn’t get in ways that would cost several billion less and they’re not going to get much of a return of investment on it either. But since patronage rewards are front loaded they do stupid buys like this.
If they just wanted the data, they could’ve gotten it for much less than 3.8 billion. They likely could’ve gotten it for 3.7 billion less at least. Or just send some guys to steal it like they did with Twitter back in the day. Much cheaper.