Mayhem joins Niantic!
By: Ivan Zhou
Tags: Startup, Gaming, Acquisition, Tech, Consumer

I am excited to announce that Mayhem has been acquired by Niantic! The team will be joining Niantic to continue building new social experiences that will amplify and connect the global community of Niantic explorers. We will be bringing our proven expertise in creating community-focused products to Niantic, and look forward to unlocking brand new ways for players to create memories with their friends and families, meet new people, and connect with each other.

As part of the acquisition, we will be sunsetting Mayhem as a standalone product in February so we can focus our energy on a shared vision at Niantic and drive new innovations in social for AR real-world gaming. To all of our players, thank you for letting us build Mayhem with you. Over the years, you have always guided us towards a bigger vision of what we could accomplish, and your passion and creativity taught us so much about what it means to bring people together.

The Beginning

When my cofounder Anhang Zhu and I started the company three and a half years ago, our mission was to reimagine the way people interfaced with games and bring players together in a meaningful way. As lifelong gamers, we had front row seats to the explosion of today’s online multiplayer formats. From titles like Warcraft, Quake and StarCraft launching in the 90’s to the release of mods like Counter-Strike and Dota — these games transformed the industry. But despite the accelerated evolution of content over the last two decades, the way that people played together had barely changed at all. Developers focused on elevating the gameplay experience, but the core social connections between players formed and persisted externally on platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Discord. Although games functioned well as a catalyst, the social fabric that holds people together was fragmented, and ultimately disconnected from the games.

In 2017, Anhang and I set out to solve this problem by building a product that could interface directly with a game to surface gameplay data in real-time and unlock a new category of interactive experiences.

Our first product, Visor, augmented the game experience using a combination of overlays, visual alerts, and audio cues to provide instant performance feedback during gameplay. Think J.A.R.V.I.S., but for gamers! We spent 18 months building the product with our users across numerous iterations before we found what felt like product-market fit. But as we watched tens of thousands of gamers adopt Visor in the first few weeks, something unexpected happened. We originally believed that game data was the key to unlocking new first party experiences like real-time feedback, but instead, our users were orders of magnitude more interested in leveraging that data to engage with their friends, share stats, and improve by playing together. So instead of quickly expanding Visor to support our next game, we took a step back, aligned our focus with that new insight, and started building towards what eventually became Mayhem.

Since we first started the company, it took us a little over two years and six product iterations before we succeeded in building the Mayhem that exists today. Over that time, the common thread that connected all of our products was the core understanding that games were at their most powerful when they brought people together and helped them form deep connections through meaningful interactions.

Building Mayhem, Joining Niantic

In July 2019, we launched Mayhem to a small community of several hundred people that played games together every day. Within one week of launch, we knew we were on the right path because the product was instantly co-opted by the community. Even though the first version was just a simple community leaderboard, hooked up to a game, and updated in real-time, our early adopters took that and ran away with it. Since then, we’ve scaled Mayhem to thousands of communities, giving millions of gamers a deeper way to connect with each other. We have been humbled time and time again by the support, feedback, and creative ways people have used Mayhem with their communities from weekly game nights to events with tens of thousands of concurrent players, and everything in between.

Our community of creators taught us the importance of designing the right environment, not just creating an ephemeral, multiplayer experience. Persistent environments become a home, a place that bridges the before, during, and after, whenever people play together. So in the beginning of 2020, we doubled down on communities to create a home for our users, while laying the foundation to go beyond.