The Collective Ace Group acquires By Aliens mobile game studio

The Collective Ace Group (TCAG), a broad-based gaming company, has expanded its reach by acquiring By Aliens (BA), a mobile game development and publishing studio.

This strategic move further solidifies TCAG’s position as a comprehensive one-stop service hub for the gaming community.

The acquisition of By Aliens adds more than 70 game devs and an annual revenue of $15 million into the Berlin-based The Collective Ace Group.

This development, combined with the existing capabilities of GodSpeed Gaming Solutions and The Most Games, gives TCAG a talent pool of over 200 gaming specialists. This collective strength spans various domains, including development, quality assurance (QA), live operations, localization, user acquisition (UA), ad monetization, and publishing.

Founded by René Retz, Javier Parejo, and Cayan Appel, By Aliens has garnered success with its casual gaming franchise, Bid Wars.

René Retz, founder of By Aliens, said in a statement, “The Group’s vision strongly resonates with us. TCAG has been doing that over the past years at a much larger scale, and we are thrilled to be contributing to their global strategy and growth. Our experience in investing in studios in Latin America aligns with TCAG’s approach of extending capabilities across the entire value chain of game development.”

Since the release of the first game in 2015, the franchise has grown, reaching a global fan base of 75+ million, with the latest installment, Bid Wars 3, launching in December 2023.

Josh Harlan, founder of Palm Beach-based private equity firm Harlan Capital Partners, is TCAG’s largest investor. In a statement, he said, “We are extremely excited by the deal as it strengthens the Group’s offerings along the functions of publishing, user acquisition and growth.”

Parth Das, founder of TCAG, said in a statement, “We had been working with BA for a while before deciding to join forces. The synergies that get unlocked within the Group now are tremendous, allowing us to significantly scale up our operations and target newer markets.”

In a message to GamesBeat, Das added, “It was amazing to see the synergies in action between By Aliens and our existing group companies like Godspeed Games and The Most Games. It was a no brainer for us to join forces. We are extremely excited to have Rene and the BA team join the group. We collaborated before merging and the resulting synergies were significant enabling us to expand operations and reach
new markets effectively. Not only does BA have highly reputable teams but also they set the bar of quality extremely high. We as a group focus heavily on the quality of work and we are extremely thrilled to be
bringing this awesome studio on board.”

The Collective Ace Group, known for its end-to-end game development and publishing services across PC, mobile, and console platforms, has collectively worked on more than 2,000 games played by a global audience exceeding 500 million gamers from over 150 countries.

With the increasing cost of game development and increasing consolidation, TCAG said it provides a more cost-effective way to handle publishing & live-ops, development and porting, project/product management, localization and voiceover, QA and customer service, art, design, user acquisition and more without increasing overhead. TCAG was founded in 2021 and it has 270 people.