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

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.