Niantic to shut down Peridot mobile game, pivots franchise to AR devices

Niantic has put Peridot on a hard shutdown clock: in-app purchases were disabled on April 23, 2026, the game leaves the App Store and Google Play on May 14, 2026, and the servers go dark on August 31, 2026. If you still have paid currency, boost items, or anything tied to your Dots, this is the window to use it before the mobile version disappears for good.

The immediate play here is simple. Log in, spend whatever you have left, and give your pets the time Niantic itself is asking for. The farewell note told players to use remaining items, go on walks, and spend time with their Dots before the shutdown. Once August 31 hits, that whole mobile loop is over, along with any progress that depends on the live servers.

This is not being framed as the end of Peridot itself. Niantic says the franchise will continue on other spatial platforms and that the mobile game became increasingly difficult to support at a level worthy of it as the project grew beyond phones. That pivot is already visible in Peridot Beyond for Snap Spectacles and Hello, Dot for Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro, with Niantic describing Peridot as a franchise built around augmented reality, generative AI, and spatial computing rather than a single app.

The corporate split behind the shutdown matters too. Niantic Spatial says it acquired Ingress and Peridot, while Scopely took Niantic’s games business, including Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom, Monster Hunter Now, and Wayfarer. Peridot is being pulled out of the standard mobile lineup and kept alive as a spatial experiment, which tells you exactly where Niantic sees the future of the IP.

The commercial numbers explain why this happened. Peridot launched globally on May 9, 2023, and earlier industry estimates put its gross in-app purchase revenue at about $1.4 million by June 2023, then just over $800,000 from roughly 1.2 million downloads after a little more than a month. Niantic later estimated lifetime IAP revenue at under $3 million after three years.

That is the real warning sign here. Peridot was supposed to be one of the cleaner bets on AR-native mobile play, with real-world walking built into the loop and a cute pet layer meant to stick. Instead, it became another reminder that small live-service AR games can burn through attention fast, and that Niantic is now betting the franchise’s future on devices that are still far less mainstream than a phone.