Niantic CEO John Hanke says that Pokemon Go's

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Pokemon Go's first sponsorship tie-in is with McDonald's in Japan, which has turned 3,000 participating restaurants into Gyms in the game's virtual world."My belief is that the sponsored-location model is a better business model for games", said Hanke in an interview with Forbes . "It will provide a compliment to in-app purchase."In app-purchase will be the majority of the revenue, but it does take some of the pressure off of us to squeeze hard on the purchase side which would be detrimental to the game."Hanke also says that the sponsorships will always be a part of the fabric of the game itself: "The idea with real world games," he explained, "was to build an advertising model that is deeply tied to the way the game itself works... so it doesn’t break the flow of the game. It doesn’t feel like something is grafted on."It's yet another piece of design that carries over directly from Niantic's last game: "We incorporated that sponsored location model into Ingress the day it was launched. The idea was to build an alternative to in-app purchase based on idea that in-app purchase exerts a lot of pressure on game design that can lead to games that are not very much fun to play even if they make a lot of money."Hanke also briefly discussed when and how we can expect to see new Pokemon - the game's currently missing the original 151's five legendaries, and Ditto cannot yet be captured - added to the game:"Well there are a number of threads that you will start to see. You will see new Pokémon come into the game around special events at certain times in certain parts of the world. You’ll see us do some things around events."Hanke explained that Niantic may well simply support the numerous events and meet-ups being created by users across the world, rather than setting up its own, and may also add achievement medals for attending supported events, too.And the reasoning behind his seeming unwillingness to talk about when this might happen? It's just not ready yet:"Some of this, it’s not like we’re withholding our secret plan from you. We intend to iterate and work on these specs right up until the moment it ships. Stuff evolves until the last minute."Back in the present day, Pokemon Go just received a major update , refining many elements and bugs while notably removing the "Nearby" footprints feature

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor and is even more convinced that Newcastle-upon-Tyne is the best city going after he caught a Gyarados there on Friday. Follow him on Twitter