'You were never the player': How Pokémon Go turned humans into unpaid workers for a $3.5 billion AI database

Leave the home, turn right and point your camera at the Poké Stop, all to capture an imaginative and generated Pokémon that would be yours. When Pokémon Go launched in 2016, about 500 million people installed it in the first 60 days and did just this.

But what they didn't realise at the time was that while they secured the bragging rights about capturing Bulbasaur, they sacrificed the privacy of their location and unknowingly worked to build an AI dataset now being used for unimaginable returns with no dues for them.

What was being carried out under the disguise of entertaining and engaging audiences was one of the largest crowdsourced data collection efforts in history. Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go recently revealed that it used the photos and AR scans collected through the game to produce a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. This data is now being used to train AI navigation systems for delivery robots.

How did Niantic carry out the sourcing?

Pokémon Go required players to physically move around specific locations, interact with their surroundings through their phone cameras to be able to find and capture a Pokémon. Every time a user visited a Poké Stop, the game was recording visual data from the phone's camera.

Specifically in 2020, the collection effort elevated levels when Niantic added 'Field Research' tasks which asked users to scan real-world statues, landmarks and other locations with their cameras in exchange for in-game rewards.

Added to the coursework, were Pokémon battle arenas which were linked to physical locations that players visited repeatedly. Thus, when millions scanned the same spots, in different weather, angles, heights, and times the dataset became more diverse than any models or mapping could produce.

A gameplay in real

Pokémon was an anime that premiered in Japan in April 1997 and quickly became a global sensation, debuting in US a year later. The series that had viewers obsessed with animals with powers, engaging in battles and sprouted many toy campaigns and video games.

One that went most viral was Pokémon Go, which Niantic sold to Scopely, a gaming company owned by Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group, in May 2025 for a whopping $3.5 billion. At the same time, Niantic spun off a separate AI company called Niantic Spatial, which retained the mapping data and technology and gained $250 million in funding.

Brian McClendon, CTO of Niantic Spatial shared that the company has built a Visual Positioning System (VPS) trained on those collected images, with MIT Technology Review. Rather than relying on GPS satellite signals, the VPS figures out where a device is by analysing what its camera sees and matching it against the database created with the help of the game.

McClendon claimed that the system covers more than one million locations worldwide and can pinpoint a device's position within a few centimetres.

Entertainment for money?

On March 10, Niantic announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, a startup that operates small sidewalk delivery robots for food and groceries. The company has about 1,000 suitcase-sized robots in Los Angeles, Chicago, Jersey City, Miami and Helsinki and claims its robots have completed about 500,000 deliveries so far.

In order to compete with human delivery riders, the robots can not only rely on GPS and this is where Niantic Spatial's VPS comes in. John Hanke, CEO of Niantic Spatial, simplified the aim: getting a virtual Pikachu to run around realistically and getting a delivery robot to navigate safely through a city turn out to be the same problem.

The human question

As of March 2026, about 5.4 to 5.7 million people play Pokémon Go daily. But while Niantic and its leaders might be focusing on their futuristic AI approach along with reaping their own benefits, a larger question looms: what about the humans?

Not only did players of the game unknowingly contribute to the creation of the database, one of the things the game went viral for, was the deaths it led to. In 2017, just a year after the release of the game, researchers at Purdue University's Krannert School of Management analysed 12,000 police reports in one county in Indiana to find that the game caused 256 avoidable deaths in 156 days and up to £5 billion worth of damage.

The revelation has caused much outrage by players and humanitarian activists on social media. "you were never the player. you were the product," claimed one enraged user on X.

"Everyone who did pokemon go better start a class action lawsuit to sue for compensation then. They illegally tricked people into working for them, and had the people pay them instead of the other way around. This one will be an easy win," claimed another.

As of now, one could say that Niantic Spatial has built one of the most diverse and comprehensive Large Geospatial Models (LGMs) with the help of images scanned by players. While competitors like Google DeepMind and World Labs are building synthetic virtual worlds to train AI, the company gained an upper hand with real-world data and actual images.

Its profit is only going to increase with more and more partnerships and development. But what it makes one question is the value of human life for the tech biggies. They are all facing lawsuits for the lives their creations have ended with their screwed models and yet are profiting off calmly.

Does a better human future come at the cost of sacrificing human lives right now? A quote by Frank Herbert might trigger some response: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."