Origin and first products (2008–2012) The company, which was originally called
Addmired, was founded in 2008. In 2012, Addmired changed its name to
Machine Zone, after raising $8 million in funding from
Menlo Ventures. Gabriel Leydon founded the company with partners Mike Sherrill and current
Chief Technology Officer Halbert Nakagawa. It was among the participants in
Y Combinator's
Winter 2008 Accelerator program for startups. The company got its start making
AddHer and
AddHim, a pair of
MySpace widgets that
TechCrunch called "a
Hot or Not-esque social network plugin." Addmired later pivoted into the free-to-play game space, releasing 13 games between 2009 and 2012, including the
iOS games
Original Gangstaz,
iMob and
iMob 2, and
Global War Riot.
Breakout games (2012–2015) Machine Zone released
Game of War: Fire Age in October 2012 in New Zealand and Australia. According to
VentureBeat, Leydon had used the 2012 venture funding to "bet everything on
Game of War," putting a team of 80 people on an 18-month project to design and build a complex
real-time strategy game, including creation of a messaging infrastructure and language translation layer that would allow worldwide participation in the game's alliances and chat. The company launched
Mobile Strike, a modern warfare game, in November 2015. In an advertising campaign that featured
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the game was marketed as a product of a company called Epic War, later revealed to be a development studio of Machine Zone.
Rebranding (2016–2017) The company rebranded itself as MZ in 2016. That year, a funding round valued the company at $5 billion. In April 2016, simultaneously with rebranding itself as MZ, the company announced the launch of a new
platform as a service, leveraging the
cloud-based networking infrastructure of its
real-time gaming platform. Using the existing technology developed to monitor hundreds of thousands of players in its real-time mobile games, the company developed and demonstrated a system for the government of
New Zealand that included applications to view and manage public transportation more efficiently, including an ability to provide timely information, down to the second, on bus and train movements. In November 2016, Machine Zone announced that it was partnering with
Square Enix to develop a
Final Fantasy XV mobile MMO. Through a subsidiary company, Epic Action LLC, Machine Zone released
Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire in June 2017.
Refocus on gaming (2018–present) In June 2018, MZ's
board of directors replaced founder and CEO Gabe Leydon in order to refocus the company on gaming. Leydon had announced in March 2018 that MZ was working with Hedera Hashgraph on a distributed
cryptocurrency technology called
hashgraph, a
blockchain alternative. According to
Fast Company, Leydon left the company "ostensibly to run Satori", part of MZ's platform business since early 2017, as a spinoff "standalone business" focusing on the hashgraph project. Kristen Dumont, an attorney who had been the company's
chief operating officer since 2015, replaced Leydon as CEO. In a July 2018 restructuring, Dumont laid off a large portion of Machine Zone's marketing team, approximately 125 jobs. In October 2018,
TechCrunch named the company the sixth most successful company from Y Combinator. By the end of that year, after hiring Dan Nash as its
chief financial officer, MZ had raised around $720 million in a new round of funding, with investors including
JP Morgan, Anthos Capital, and
Menlo Ventures. MZ released one game in 2018,
World War Rising. Described by
Pocket Gamer as "effectively a
reskin of the developer's previously successful
4X strategy games", the new title offered a military-themed interface depicting armies from
World War I to the modern era. The game, which was reportedly "stealthily launched" sometime before the end of August 2018, was identified as a product of Mobile War LLC rather than MZ. While Dumont confirmed MZ's ownership of the game during a tech conference in November 2018,
World War Rising did not appear on MZ's website until at least May 2019. In March 2020, MZ published 'CrystalBorne', and in May was acquired by publishing-platform company
AppLovin for approximately $500 million, which represented a large decline in value and a loss for many investors. ==Marketing==