The Xbox team might have made some of the biggest gaming franchises on the planet over the last 20 years, popularising the likes of Halo and Gears of War, but it's fair to say it's never really conquered the mobile space.

That could partly explain why Xbox Games Studios just announced a partnership with Tencent, specifically the Chinese giant's subsidiary Timi, to explore gaming projects together.

While there's nothing in the official announcement to explicitly confirm that the idea is to work on mobile titles, that's very much the heartland of Tencent's work so we'd be pretty surprised if it turned out otherwise. 

Timi is, albeit fairly quietly if you're not in its dominant territories, one of the biggest developers in the world by revenue, and has worked on some hugely popular mobile titles including Call of Duty: Mobile, which is skyrocketing. 

Quite what franchises might be up for grabs in the new partnership is unknown right now, and pure mobile titles represent an interesting question for Xbox - wouldn't it rather people signed up for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and simply streamed console-quality games to their phones, after all? 

Still, we'll likely find out more about the deal down the line, when projects are actually in motion and there's something more to announce.