U.S. mobile game dev Machine Zone and Japanese game company Square Enix have agreed to a partnership that will see the pair collaborating on a massively-multiplayer online game for mobile devices, set in the world of Square Enix’s upcoming Final Fantasy XV.
It’s rare to see studios on different sides of the Pacific (Machine Zone is based in California, Square Enix in Japan) collaborating like this, and rarer still to see Square Enix collaborating with a Western mobile studio on a project tied into an upcoming Final Fantasy game.
However, this is right in line with how Machine Zone has been trying to rebrand itself from a mobile game developer to a mobile game platform provider. Earlier this year the company made a show of trying to rebrand and license out a more powerful version of the netowrking platform which underlies its mega-popular Game of War: Fire Age (pictured) mobile strategy game.
The forthcoming Final Fantasy XV mobile MMO will reportedly operate on a version of that platform, and Machine Zone is opening a (yet unnamed) studio specifically to work on it with Square Enix. It did something very similar this time last year when it opened a new studio to work on its first big game post-Game of War, the Schwarzenegger-fronted modern military mobile strategy game Mobile Strike.