Niantic will be adopting its advertising model from Ingress for Pokemon Go. The developer is said to be preparing to offer sponsored locations, where clients are charged for turning their chosen locations into Pokestops and Gyms.
Ingress turned stores from clients like Vodafone and Duane Reade into Portals designed to draw players in. The idea is that this would increase foot traffic into these locations, and would hopefully turn into additional revenue. Clients are charged based on the number of people who walk into the store, based on GPS information collected from the app.
Users on Reddit claim to have discovered entries for McDonalds in the code for Pokemon Go on Android. Whether this points to a sponsored deals with the fast food chain isn’t entirely certain yet; although another Redditor points out that the McDonalds logo can also be found in the Pokemon Go assets folder.
The global rollout for Pokemon Go has been slowed due to a greater than expected amount of traffic crashing the servers. The game is currently only available in selected countries, with the European launch only recently happening in Germany. Despite rumours about Pokemon Go arriving in Malaysia soon, there is no indication that the official launch is happening.
