Game of War: Fire Age
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GamesBeat speaker spotlight: How Machine Zone’s Gabe Leydon made a huge mobile game bet

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Gabe Leydon’s Machine Zone was a solid mobile indie game publisher on mobile, but he took a major departure from the status quo on his latest project.

Leydon raised venture capital funding and set a huge team of 80 people to work on a single game. They toiled on Game of War: Fire Age, for 19 months. They built a mobile messaging platform, created a translation engine so players could team up across territories, and created an extensive fantasy strategy game. That turned out to be one of the biggest gambles yet in the creation of a new mobile intellectual property.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.