Below is an excerpt from The Game File, a Substack covering the business and culture of video games, by Stephen Totilo.
Pikmin Bloom impresses. An iicon panel featuring executives from mobile gaming giant Scopely and Pokémon GO maker Niantic recounted the former’s $3.5 billion purchase of the latter in 2025. The conversation yielded the largely expected positive assessment of the deal, one year in: good team chemistry, executives sticking around, 10% year-on-year increase in engagement for Pokémon Go, “double digit increases” in kilometers walked while playing the games, the debut of Pokémon GO-style in-person gatherings for players of Scopely’s Monopoly Go.
More of a surprise was the upbeat talk about Niantic’s less-discussed 2021 Nintendo collaboration Pikmin Bloom, a mobile game that tasks players to walk outside to plant virtual flowers, teaming up with little Pikmin creatures along the way.
Ed Wu, who launched Pokémon Go at Niantic and is now president of the Niantic division under Scopely, said that early deal-making meetings between Niantic and Scopely in California were, to no one’s surprise, dominated by discussions of Pokémon Go. But they did discuss other games, including Monster Hunter Now.
“We also talked a bit about Pikmin Bloom,” he said. “And when I put the Pikmin Bloom metrics up on the screen, (Scopely co-CEO) Javier (Ferreira) stands up immediately and he points at us and says, ‘Those can’t be right.’ Like, I had the exact same reaction as (him) two years ago during soft launch. ... He says, ‘Those make Pikmin Bloom the most retentive game in the entire mobile game industry.’… We knew for two years of working with the game, that once people enjoy the simple act of getting out every day to walk, they just keep coming back.
“And so, he immediately recognizes that, hey, this is a place that is like... truly investible, (can) truly scale.’”
Scopely, which is owned by the Saudi-sovereign-wealth-funded Savvy Games, has the money to pour into games. A purchase of Niantic brought the prospect of substantial investment boosting Niantic’s existing games.
“They followed through on that after the acquisition,” Wu said, “Putting the investment into the team, investment into product, investment into the marketing. That has allowed (Pikmin Bloom) to now become the number one app in Taiwan and a number of different markets for the past couple of months. And, year on year, Pikmin Bloom’s daily actives are now up 80 percent.”