Ares Interactive Talks About the Creation of Games and the Mobile Market
Mike DeLaet, President of Ares Interactive, shared with us why Ares was created, how they analyze games to do the scaling, the challenges behind the mobile market, and how they solve them.
Introduction
Mike, can you give us a little intro about your story and your new company, Ares Interactive? What do you and your company specialize in?
I've spent most of my career building and scaling free-to-play games, particularly in genres where execution and live operations matter more than a single launch moment. I've been fortunate to work with teams that built meaningful, durable businesses around games millions of players love, at companies such as Scopely, Mattel, Glu, Kabam, and others.
Ares Interactive was founded with a simple thesis: in today's market, disciplined execution beats novelty. We focus on building fun games that our fans enjoy playing and scaling free-to-play games using proven core loops, strong live operations, data-driven user acquisition, and increasingly, AI-enabled workflows. The fun factor of a game isn't something we take lightly, as it is one of the most important things for a game company.
We operate across multiple studios and genres, from action roguelite shooters like Heroes vs. Hordes, to new licensed experiences like Baseball Hits 26. We specialize in scaling our games for live service, user acquisition, and mobile hardware optimization. The Ares team and developers in our studio group have been in the gaming industry for a long time, and we are leveraging our experience to develop new titles that utilize proven gameplay mechanics and player engagement strategies.
One of your superpowers is scaling. I'm wondering if you could maybe talk with us a little bit about the discovery, some patterns, and things that help you systematically grow games so successfully?
Over time, you start to see that successful games tend to share a few characteristics. The centerpiece of those characteristics is a proven core gameplay loop. In order to create compelling gameplay experiences, we take an approach that is informed by player behavior pattern data and then improve and innovate from there.
Then, it's important to test KPIs, like Day 1 Retention and Cost Per Install (CPI), in controlled budget scenarios early on so you aren't headed down a path to a point of no return where you can't cancel a project due to sunk costs. This extends to creative marketing assets: testing as many variations as possible early on helps you find the most effective strategies for paid ad promotion.
Focusing on the earliest parts of a game's development and soft launch periods allows you to then focus on the Lifetime Value (LTV) curve and scaling. It's not just about lowering your cost per install, but also properly increasing the slope of that LTV curve through strong live ops content, economy tuning, IP integration, and an engaging endgame loop. Scaling a game is about building a machine that can repeatedly test, validate, optimize, and reinvest, without emotional attachment to ideas that don't improve your metrics.
Can you tell us a bit about your view of the mobile market? For a long time, all mobile business was a balancing act between your LTV and UAC. A lot has changed: walled gardens have fallen, GDPR happened, and traffic has changed. How do you approach it now? How do you see the platform, and how do you approach game publishing on mobile these days?
The old world was simple: LTV versus CPI. Today, it's more nuanced. Privacy changes, signal loss, ATT, platform fragmentation. All of that has forced the industry to mature. Deterministic targeting is gone. Creative, product-market fit, and post-install monetization matter more than ever. Our approach now focuses on user acquisition through marketing and paid ads. We test themes before we test full games.
Testing monetization early, focusing on what Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) looks like on Day 1 through Day 7 to give us proper direction, and then optimizing that for Month 1 performance. Another big change the industry has seen is a shift in profitability mindset. Growth at any cost is gone. Today's market rewards capital efficiency. Mobile is more competitive, but also more rational. The teams that combine creative excellence with financial discipline win.
Regarding platforms, iOS remains immensely important for monetization density, even if it can be harder to attribute volume from those users. We're also diversifying by exploring web, PC, and alternative stores, as well as hybrid distribution models. Relying purely on one ecosystem is no longer optimal.
In the current market, is brand/IP still the most important element of decreasing risk? What ways do you think about decreasing risks with games?
IP can be a powerful tool to mitigate risk for a game, but only if utilized correctly. Strong IP can lower your cost per install, improve organic visibility among that IP's fanbase, and those fans help conversion rates for monetization. We've seen that layering licensed IP onto a proven engine can create 2x–10x revenue uplift compared to an original-IP version. But only when the gameplay foundation is strong.
This might sound obvious, but the game itself still has to be good. IP can't fix a broken core loop. If the game isn't fun, recognizable characters won't save it. There are myriad tools to decrease risk with your games as well. Some other proven approaches include validating themes through concept ads before licensing, reusing battle-tested engines, setting strict KPI gates in a soft launch that the game must meet before moving forward, controlling project scope and team size, and making incremental updates rather than massive overhauls.
Overhaul updates can be costly in terms of both budget and development time, whereas incremental changes can be just as effective for player retention. All of these, including IP to a degree, are tools that will help stack small advantages for teams needed to run live service games in the long term.
In terms of technical challenges, what do you feel are the biggest hurdles with mobile projects these days? Is the technology making things easier?
The bar for polish has never been higher. Players expect console-quality responsiveness in a mobile user experience. Technology is both easier and more complex than ever. What has been easier are the workflows introduced by the Unity- and Unreal-compatible mobile engines, the backend infrastructure is easier to build, Live ops tooling allows our team to drop content much faster, and the AI-assisted pipelines for coding and art development.
On the flipside, it has gotten much harder to optimize performance across devices. Once a game scales, it can be tougher to remedy crashes and load times, analytics aren't as easily tracked, and it's hard to suss out the truth in KPIs across storefronts. Managing SDK fragmentation and integrating your monetization systems without degrading the UX you've built are all challenging.
We're investing heavily in AI across engineering, art, QA automation, and creative generation. It doesn't replace talent. It amplifies it. But integrating AI into pipelines responsibly and efficiently is a real technical challenge.
How do you think games are changing and evolving in 2026? Where do you think the market is going in general?
A few trends feel clear. You're seeing a lot more hybridization of genres, with elements like Roguelites, idle mechanics, RPG progression, and social systems blending. More companies will reskin proven engines with different IP to create "multiple shots on goal."
Many companies are now utilizing AI tools to reduce development cycles, allowing for faster prototypes, smarter QA, dynamic content generation, and other tasks that take up chunks of time. There's generally a greater focus on supporting games for the long haul. Companies are realizing that the real value lies in multi-year LTV curves, not in launch spikes.
Capital efficiency is also crucial. Successful studios that manage burn and focus on profitable scaling will outperform studios chasing vanity installs. In 2026, the winners won't necessarily be the most innovative. They'll be the most disciplined operators who combine data, creativity, IP leverage, and technology to build durable franchises.
