Pokémon Go: Impact on Yelp Restaurant Reviews

Abstract

Pokémon Go, the popular Augmented Reality based mobile application, launched in July of 2016. The game's meteoric rise in usage since that time has had an impact on not just the mobile gaming industry, but also the physical activity of players, where they travel, where they spend their money, and possibly how they interact with other social media applications. In this paper, we studied the impact of Pokémon Go on Yelp reviews. For restaurants near PokéStops, we found a slight drop in the number of online reviews.