Battle Cats fakes a Black Friday heist: rejected cats 'steal' 100M cans of cat food

The Battle Cats, a deliberately weird tower-defense mobile game with more than 85 million downloads, wanted to grow its reach in North America. For Black Friday — one of the busiest promotional seasons in gaming — PONOS and its new creative partner R/GA faced the standard playbook of currency discounts and decided to do the opposite.

Run a fake in-lore heist instead of sales: three rejected cats 'hack' PONOS and steal 100M cans of Cat Food, then players vote which one gets into the game.

PONOS's social channels appeared hacked by 'The OutCats,' three characters rejected from the game nine years earlier, and the company issued a statement that thieves had made off with 100 million cans of Cat Food. A ransom-style video demanded the trio be added to the game; every player who logged in received 999 cans. Fans decoded the metadata within 24 hours to find the real mechanic: a vote, fuelled by in-game purchases that doubled as ballots, with lost audition tapes, smear campaigns and influencers taking sides.

The campaign became the best US promotion in the game's history: a 131% revenue increase, 900,000 new users and 1.1 million returning users, with Trash Cat ultimately voted into the game. It won a D&AD 2024 Graphite Pencil in Gaming & Virtual Worlds and kicked off a long-term creative partnership between PONOS and R/GA.

The Battle Cats is a deliberately strange mobile tower-defense game — cats fight everything from everyday animals to bizarre creatures — and by late 2023 it had amassed more than 85 million downloads. PONOS, its Japanese developer, wanted a bigger North American audience, and Black Friday, the most crowded promotional season in gaming, was the deadline.

Instead of offering the industry-standard discounts on the game's Cat Food currency, PONOS and R/GA Japan staged a scandal inside the game's own lore. A criminal gang called The OutCats — three characters rejected from the game nine years earlier — apparently hacked PONOS's social channels and stole 100 million cans of Cat Food, the game's currency. PONOS played along with official statements, and every player who logged in received 999 free cans.

The twist was a vote. Fans dug into the campaign's metadata within 24 hours and discovered the promotion: buy in-game items that doubled as ballots and choose which of the three OutCats would finally join the game. R/GA amplified the feud with lost audition tapes, influencer campaigns and even smear campaigns, letting the community take sides.

The results made it the best US campaign in the game's history — revenue up 131%, with 900,000 new users and 1.1 million returning players — and Trash Cat won the vote and entered the game. The work took a D&AD 2024 Graphite Pencil in Gaming & Virtual Worlds and became the first of an ongoing series of narrative campaigns by the PONOS-R/GA partnership.

It made the promotion an event with consequences — a robbery and a vote — instead of a price cut players scroll past.

Fans did the legwork: decoding metadata to uncover the mechanic turned discovery into part of the fun.

Giving players a real say in the game's storyline turned buyers into participants in the fiction.

The fake hack was on-brand: The Battle Cats' absurd humour made a fictional crime feel like a natural extension of the game.

When a product's absurdity is its identity, marketing can live inside the fiction: a fake crime the audience can help resolve builds more involvement than a discount.

The OutCats became the first campaign in a long-term creative-innovation partnership between PONOS and R/GA, aimed at re-engaging lapsed players and building the brand in the US. The game's community kept the characters alive — Trash Cat joined the roster, and fan discussion continued around the three outcasts — while the campaign's success led PONOS and R/GA to keep expanding The Battle Cats' narrative into unexpected real-world formats. The work also collected a D&AD 2024 Graphite Pencil in Gaming & Virtual Worlds.