>>27455804Niantic being part of Alphabet? That was pretty common knowledge.
When the Google restructure happened Larry Page (at the time CEO of Google) appointed himself CEO of Alphabet and gave the title of Google CEO to Sundar Pichai, which at the time was the head of Android.
The idea of the restructure was to take companies that were acquired by google or were internally born within the company and separate them into companies under Alphabet. This would make Google more focused as a company that does its service on ad services/android/web search and leave other companies to work on their own projects.
Niantic was one of the companies that was given a choice to be part of the restructure. But at the same time since they have had talks with Nintendo since 2014 and have had positive reaction with their main mobile game Ingress in Japan, Niantic wanted to leave the nest and be their own company. Mainly because if they were still a part of Alphabet/Google they would likely not see that much revenue coming directly to them for the game they made and/or the legal BS that may have made a Google/Niantic/Nintendo/TPC collab in a serious game would have been too big and confusing to deal with (and Google may not have cared about it all that much anyways).
Hell, Ingress at it's early days was basically a location submission system for Google's location services. Players of Ingress was basically doing Google's job for free.
