L’agreement Between Machine Zone and Square Enix relating to the creation of mobile spin-offs of Final Fantasy XV it basically covered the development costs of the game. This should make it clear on the one hand what the extent of the agreement itself is, on the other how high investments in the mobile sector are now and what the economic availability of certain studios is.
Machine Zone is responsible for billionaire hits for mobile systems such as Game of War and Mobile Strike, which collect billions of dollars every year and to which sumptuous marketing campaigns have been dedicated, including spots passed at the Super Bowl, with exceptional testimonials such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mariah Carey.
Machine Zone’s first Final Fantasy XV mobile game was the mediocre A New Empire, featuring a rapacious game economy that heavily favored paying users, but now, without any fanfare, another one is coming: War for Eos, a free-to-play casual strategy based on microtransactions. In reality it has already arrived, in the sense that it was launched on some markets in March of this year and now it seems to be available all over the world, including Italy (on Google Play for Android systems and on the App Store for iOS systems).
Let’s read the official description to better understand what we’re talking about:
Final Fantasy XV: War for Eos is a strategy game that will take you on a long adventure.
You will have a chance to build the kingdom of your dreams, gather magical resources by traveling to other kingdoms and reign over your strong empire together with your friends. You will fight in a war with other cartels to defend your kingdom and your friends. But first, you should choose the right strategy to win the war, protect the Crystal and rule the Kingdom.
Initially, the agreement between Square Enix and Machine Zone seemed to include only one spin-off of Final Fantasy XV, also because A New Empire turned out to have very little relevance to the saga, despite the use of official resources. The quality, however, was very low, as was the general care, so much so that some graphic assets were taken from Final Fantasy XIII and modified with Photoshop.
So Square Enix would have accepted a second project only for the extent of the economic agreement, as reported by RPG Site (pecunia non olet). The rights to use Final Fantasy XV for A New Empire would in fact have yielded enough to cover the development costs of the whole game. It is not clear whether War for Eos is part of the same deal or is the result of a later deal. Hopefully it’s better than A New Empire.
