After confirming its launch in Japan for tomorrow, July 20, 2016, the development team Niantic has officially confirmed that McDonald’s will be their first sponsored business location for Pokemon Go according to Tech Crunch. This comes after a leak within the Pokemon Go coding revealed the McDonald’s name in various locations leaving gamers speculating a deal was struck between Niantic and McDonald’s was made in order to gather more potential customers.
That is no longer just a rumor as McDonald’s has been confirmed to be the first sponsored business for Pokemon Go, but only within Japan. With the release of Pokemon Go within its birthplace of Japan tomorrow, gamers will be able to use McDonald’s as gym locations. There will be a total of three thousand McDonald’s locations that will be marked a sponsored location within Japan.
However, that doesn’t mean we won’t see these locations show up in various other regions. For now, it appears that these sponsored locations will be determined on how well these first few thousand sponsored locations do first. We may end up seeing major business opting to use Pokemon Go as a means to gather new customers, though that does come with some potential problems with parents who may be swaying their children from attending these establishments such as McDonald’s.
Regardless, it doesn’t appear that Pokemon Go is slowing down so it’s likely we’ll see these sponsored business locations pop up more frequently in a variety of different regions. This would also give gamers in more rural areas a chance to enjoy the game a bit more with newly established Pokemon Go gym locations.
