I used to work with another videogame franchise, so I think I get what you’re asking.

I’m sure they’ll do retail partner deals like most video games do. Go get a pokemon on your phone in the local toys-r-us, or a unique pokemon only found in the isles of best buy. Perhaps one specific to McDonalds accompanying a happy meal promotion. Those types of promos are not a huge revenue generator by themselves, but they get customers in the door (within a certain demographic). The cost of launching such a promo is neglible. They may take a common pokemon and change the color from red to green, and say the “rare” green one is only found at Walmart. It takes them 10 seconds to code.

More likely, a retailer would want something tied to purchase. I’m not familiar with the game itself (given the privacy and security concerns it raises, I haven’t tried it). I don’t know if they’ll cross that threshold just yet in their marketing. However, when they do, that’ll be a huge revenue stream. I have friends who worked on the “Skylanders” game franchise, and they were pulling in cash by the truck load due to those types of deals. Seriously, a common skylanders character with a shiney metallic paint job would go for $800 on eBay, while the same one with normal paint would be $10. They had serious problems with counterfeiters. Pokemon will function similarly in terms of marketing. It’s a well engineered, low cost, high profit, addictive money pit where people will be willing to drop $5 here, $10 there… and it will add up with average players dropping hundreds of dollars into the game a little at a time.

The game producers themselves (I’m getting this from an interview I saw), have scrapped many ideas for reasons of safety. They wanted to have some of the creatures be nocturnal for example, but didn’t want little kids sneaking out of the house to catch a rare nighttime pokemon at the park. So I don’t think common brick and mortar stores will be able to run their own promotions for that reason. The idea of adults luring kids to a location using a video game would undermine their business in a big way. If you even tried advertising such a thing, they’d sue your ass off. They seriously have more lawyers on retainer for going after unauthorized use of the trademark than they do real app developers. They’ve shut down conventions, small-time cyber cafe’s doing lan parties etc for just using the word “pokemon” in a cheap flier advertising. Stuiff like “game night” at a video arcade will be shut down with a court order (by police in one instance) if they hang a pokemon image in an advertisement for the business. They have a track record of going after even the smallest businesses for the slightest infraction. You absolutely cannot advertise a pokemon event if you want to avoid a big lawsuit. They are the worst in the industry in terms of hyper-aggressive trademark protection.

For big retail partnerships, the money would be in the tens millions just to bring Nintendo to the table to discuss it. These promos usually accompany a for-sale product however. Give it a year, they’ll probably release a console game for $60+ (for the Nintendo, I doubt they’ll make the leap to other platforms), and allow you to import your real-world pokemon collection from the app into the game. That would give Nintendo a reason to deal with retailers. Until then, I doubt you’ll see any real promotions. They’ll come eventually, but accompanying another product or secondary revenue stream.