Ares Interactive Raises $70 Million to Build Mobile Gaming Hits During One of the Toughest Periods in the Industry

Ares Interactive's $70 Million Bet: Why One Gaming Round Is Breaking Every Rule in a Broken Market

The Round That Doesn't Fit the Narrative

On February 3, 2026, Ares Interactive announced a $70 million Series A led by General Catalyst — one of the largest early-stage raises in gaming in recent years, arriving at a moment when the sector is still nursing wounds from two years of mass layoffs, compressed valuations, and over $25,000 jobs cut across 2024 and 2025. Total gaming venture funding globally tracked near $2 billion in 2025, down sharply from prior peaks. The average Series A in the space was a fraction of this size. Ares didn't just defy the downturn. It exposed how capital is concentrating around a specific, repeatable playbook.

A Team That Has Done This Before — Literally

The company's leadership is the story's spine. President Mike DeLaet brings a rare combination: deep partnerships and licensing experience from stints at Scopely, Kabam, and as Mattel's digital gaming head, layered with scaled live-operations knowledge. Founder and executive chairman Niccolo de Masi is the architect of the $2.4 billion EA acquisition of Glu Mobile in 2021 — he knows what a hit factory looks like at exit scale. The advisory board reinforces the pattern: Chris Akhavan, former CRO of Glu; Matt Fischer, former head of Apple's Worldwide App Store; Andrew Stalbow, who built Best Fiends at Seriously Digital; and Kent Wakeford, former COO of Kabam. This is not a first-time founding team placing a moonshot. It is an operator-class roster executing a second act.

The Traction Behind the Capital

Ares is not pre-revenue. Its flagship title, Heroes vs Hordes — a survival roguelike RPG originally developed by Berlin studio Swift Games — has surpassed 13 million installs. Third-party estimates place lifetime revenue above $30 million since its April 2022 launch, with the game maintaining a position in top European mobile charts. The company also runs a direct-to-consumer web shop for the title, a deliberate margin-engineering move that signals monetization sophistication beyond standard app-store economics. For General Catalyst to lead at this valuation, internal dashboards almost certainly showed metrics that public announcements never reveal: retention curves, payer conversion rates, or UA scaling efficiency that justify the price.

The Real Strategy: Portfolio Roll-Up, Not Single-Hit Gambling

Here is where most coverage misses the point. DeLaet has explicitly stated that Ares will scale through a mix of acquisitions and lean senior teams — the company currently runs roughly 50 staff across its San Francisco studio, 7th Inning, and its Berlin operation, Swift Games. The most credible path to venture-scale returns is not one breakout title. It is a Scopely-style playbook: operate one or two cash-flowing mid-tier live games, acquire undervalued titles or teams at rational prices during an industry downturn, layer shared UA infrastructure and live-ops tooling across the portfolio, and use portfolio math to manufacture a higher probability of hits. The $70 million buys time and optionality for exactly that.

Baseball Hits 26: The Highest-Variance Piece

The upcoming launch of Baseball Hits 26 — featuring officially licensed professional baseball players — is Ares' sharpest strategic swing. It fills a credible gap left by EA's sunset of MLB Tap Sports Baseball, and sports titles with real athletes can drive fandom-driven retention and seasonal reactivation loops. But licensed sports mobile games are brutal: fixed licensing costs compress margins, and UA in the sports category is among the most expensive on mobile. If soft-launch KPIs are elite, this becomes a category-defining re-entry by proven operators. If they are not, the capital burn is real.

The Honest Question Investors Should Be Asking

The AI-enabled development narrative in the press release is real but not, by itself, a moat. Every studio claims AI integration now. What matters is whether it is embedded in the actual content production and UA creative loops in ways that compound — faster iteration creating better retention creating more revenue. The investment thesis lives or dies not on the technology label, but on unit economics and repeatability. Ares has the team to prove it. The next twelve months will determine whether this is the beginning of an F2P capital cycle — or a well-funded exception in one.

not investment advice!!