Social gaming company GREE and Yahoo Japan have formed a new company to jointly develop and operate mobile social games for smartphones.

The JV, tentatively called GxYz, is the result of an agreement between the two companies reached in November 2012, to develop a business partnership making use of their respective strengths.

As well as developing social games, the partnership aims to combine Yahoo’s user acquisition capabilities as one the biggest online media portals in Japan, and GREE’s operational expertise.

The collaboration has so far seen links to GREE’s social games introduced on the smartphone version of the Yahoo Japan portal.