How Square Enix Montreal is making the leap to free-to-play mobile games

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
June 2, 2018
Updated June 18, 2025
11 min

Square Enix has a lot of important game franchises, including Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider. But not all of those franchises are available on mobile devices.

Square Enix Montreal started out with premium mobile games that users paid for ahead of time at a fixed price. But the whole mobile market moved away from premium to free-to-play games. It hasn’t been easy for Square Enix, which is focused on PC and console games, to get the skills to be competitive in mobile.

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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.