When Power Rangers: Legacy Wars launched, we helped nWay introduce a kick-ass fighting game featuring a massive roster of our favorite Rangers and villains. A roster that grew progressively larger as they added more and more Rangers, villains and even Megazords. What could get better than that?

An all-star crossover no one knew they wanted.

nWay flexed its muscles and facilitated a crossover event in Power Rangers: Legacy Wars with an iconic set of Street Fighter mainstays including Ryu and Chun-Li. Yes, you read that right… Legacy Wars for real added Street Fighter characters to its already massive roster, and to Power Rangers lore.

So, what could we do to build buzz for this update, as awesome as it was, for a year-old free-to-play mobile game?

After hearing this crossover was in the works, and subsequently picking our jaws off the floor, we immediately got to work building a plan of attack for using this beat as a major PR blowout. We knew this news would revitalize media interest in Legacy Wars, a spike we frankly needed as fatigue has clearly set in amongst our contacts – reminder that this is a free-to-play mobile game, a label media often blacklists and ignore.

Noise. We needed a lot of it. Inspired by the growing trend of announcing and releasing music in the same day (looking at you Beyonce!), we devised a “Bomb Drop” campaign in which we would do exactly that. No standard PR build-up. No drawn out social media push. Just make the announcement day-and-date with the crossover becoming available for people to try in Legacy Wars. Doing this gave us a slew of benefits including:

• Giving players the strongest call-to-action possible. They see the news, they get hyped, they can immediately install the game for free and get going;
• Smacking top-tier media right upside the head with a powerful announcement coming straight out of the blue – an excellent way to get them to cover a free-to-play mobile game;
• Providing nWay an opportunity to lightly tease the cross over via social media.

Power Rangers: Legacy Wars and Street Fighter make for some visually striking pairings and, thankfully, nWay was able to provide us with several incredible assets for us to leverage during pitching. Having these at our disposable meant every piece of correspondence we sent to media included a striking image to help catch their weary eyes that’d usually just glaze over another free-to-play mobile game announcement. We were even able to secure an exclusive feature with Comic Book (6.6 million Unique Monthly Visitors) that showed off a slightly animated version of the storyboards nWay used to introduce the crossover and an interview with a developer.

But enough talking, our results from the “Bomb Drop” campaign truly speak for themselves. All said and done, we secured dozens of placements with top-tier media and reached an estimated 306.7 million Unique Monthly Visitors. For reference, we reached around 133.7 million Unique Monthly Visitors at Legacy Wars’ launch. Our massive viewership growth since our launch announcement – which is typically the peak for most games – essentially proves that, when paired with the right news, a “Bomb Drop” approach can be immensely lucrative.

Peep some of our top hits here (all images clickable):

Boom. Bomb dropped.

And we’re ready to drop some more.