Pokemon Go is taking the world by storm (at least in the places it’s available), and it seems that Niantic Labs is planning to make this work for them, by making the little game a money-earner in more wsays than just one.

The microtransactions in the game were a bit of a given and known about well before the game’s release, and now the secondary part of the money-earning has been lined out – sponsorship deals.

Like Niantic’s previous game of Ingress, Pokemon Go will have companies pay for their places to become ‘sponsored locations’. This means that special promotions of events will be available within those places, making players flock towards them in great numbers and hopefully meaning that every player who checks in and buys one of the sponsored locations products will get Niantic a little bit of cash. Sounds odd but the last week or so has shown that players will flock to places with Lures to catch rarer Pokemon so it’s a feasible way of making money.

Even though no specific plans have officially been set forward, some people have already figured out that McDonalds is likely to be the first of many sponsorship companies involved. Reddit user  tf2manu posted a snippet of the game’s source code that actually mntions McDonalds as a sponsor with fellow user KcYoung adding that the McDonalds logo is already in the game’s resource files with the usual clothing textures and icons.

This sort of thing doesn’t come as too big of a surprise really given that the game needs to make money to continue its servers staying online, and if you frequent the sponsored locations you’ll be getting rewards too. Maybe McDonalds isn’t your thing, but future locations will probably be added down the line and we’ve no idea who they could be yet.