In 2013, Ubisoft launched their new hacking game, Watch_Dogs, and wanted to raise awareness, create engagement and promote pre-orders. Our strategy targeted Canadian gamers to push pre-orders of Watch_Dogs by demonstrating the game experience under the theme: your phone is your weapon.

The campaign began by leveraging Ubisoft Canada’s existing Facebook fan base, then solicited the general and hard-to-impress video game crowd. Traditionally, gamers are a hard-to-reach market, since they have very loyal leanings, are very savvy of brands and titles and are subcategorized by video game genre.

A pre-order incentive is a common tactic used by video game developers. Usually, the incentive involves receiving a gift in exchange for pre-order, with no purchase necessary. Meaning, once a consumer received their incentive, they could cancel their pre-order. The tactic gives video game developers little return on their investment.

Watch_Dogs Live changed this dynamic with an app that rewarded participants with a meaningful incentive. Pre-ordering the game gave participants bonuses to move up the leaderboard. An incentive that cost us nothing, but made a difference to participants who were competing to win the grand prize, a 2014 Scion.

Watch_Dogs Live received over 200,000 downloads; double the projected number. Over 10% of those who downloaded the app pre-ordered the game, with 22,000 current pre-orders and final numbers coming at the end of May when the game is released.

We saw additional spikes in downloads and in hacking activity after each of the 4 missions were completed and video from the activations was reused as YouTube pre-roll. Watch_Dogs Live was also ranked in the top 5 games in the App Store, received 500,000 YouTube views and 8,700,000 total hacks. The 80% engagement rate was unprecedented for a free mobile gaming app.

Watch_Dogs Live created an original answer to the question of pre-order incentives, giving us a seamless tool to engage our audience, communicate frequently, promote our product, reward participation with the brand and have some fun with Canada’s gaming community.

The mobile app was an engaging tie-in to the Watch_Dogs console game. It demonstrated the salient points of the game by turning every smart phone in Canada into a hacking device. It gave our participants a taste of the game prior to the game’s release and gave clear incentives in the form of prizes for participation.