Niantic has an event to get Ingress players walking.
Niantic can direct players to particular locations with in-game events.
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Niantic enables small businesses to sponsor events in location games

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

Niantic has had big corporations like McDonald’s and Starbucks sponsor locations for some time in its location-based games. Now the creator of Pokémon Go will enable small businesses to do the same thing.

So don’t be surprised if you see your favorite local diner sponsor a location in one of Niantic’s titles, like staging a raid in Pokémon Go, where players would congregate in a single spot to defeat a boss creature. It turns out that those real-world people may get hungry or wind up spending money at the location where the raid takes place, so Niantic and the businesses stand to benefit from that traffic.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.