Dominic Guay, senior producer on Watch Dogs 2 at Ubisoft.
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Why Watch Dogs 2 creators chose to focus on San Francisco’s hacktivism

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 10 min

When Dominic Guay started working on Watch Dogs more than eight years ago, his mandate was to create a new brand for Ubisoft. The first game which debuted in 2013 was a big success, selling more than 10 million copies.

But it was a somber tale of a hacker’s revenge. With Watch Dogs 2, Guay and his team wanted to liven things up. So they shifted the setting to San Francisco and quickly focused on a theme around hacktivism, which promised laughs via “lulz” operations and rallying around a serious cause at the same time. In this case, hacktivist Marcus Holloway of the hacker group DedSec finds himself in conflict with Blume Corp., which controls the smart city of San Francisco.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.