Making Fun's John Welch

No, there's no mandate at News Corp. Again, my personal experience at News Corp is I have not been told I need to do anything with anybody. I'm very courteous when someone from another part of News Corp calls, and when I call somebody else at News Corp they're very courteous to me. We have great discussions, we talk about possibilities, but there's nobody from the home office saying you must do such and such. That's a benefit and a drawback, you know. The benefit is I get to run the business; the drawback is Fox has some great IP, News Corp has some great IP outside of Fox. There are some things where it's just like anybody else - if I want to work with them, I've got to form a partnership.

We're sharing space with the IGN folks, but their market is very much a hardcore gaming, more male-leaning market. The first couple of games I have coming out are really not that market at all, but the third one is something that might be interesting to them and so I've kind of started some conversation. But really it's they run their business, just like I run mine.

What I haven't seen at News Corp, which I've heard horror stories about at other companies, is "oh, it's easier to work with outside companies than to work within the company." That's not at all true here, from what I've seen. Everyone's extremely courteous and interested in at least exploring things. Maybe it's because there are none of these mandates - because your parents aren't telling what to do, you get on better.

I look at the social gaming space in very much the same way as I'd look at the competition in the casual online gaming space. In a sense, bring it on. We have our differentiated way we're coming at the market, partnering with outside developers, so there's kind of three categories of companies right now, all going at the same market. You've got your big super-developers like Zynga, and some of the ones that have been acquired by other big companies. They are developing their own projects with their own internal teams, they're very well-funded, they have a lot of success under their belt, they have teams to do analytics and that sort of thing.

Then you have small developers: they don't have any of that. They've got passion, they've got a lower cost base, they're creative. A lot of them will fail, but a couple will succeed with really novel, innovative ideas that become big, and hopefully they can execute on them before other people can copy them too much. And then you've got the third category, which is right now Making Fun, all by ourselves. We are here partnering, picking the very best of those concepts out of the independent space and saying "together, let's form something that looks like the best of both worlds."

Also from a marketing perspective, looking at ways we can partner within News Corp. News Corp has a whole lot of eyeballs it reaches across its various media strategies, and to the extent that we can make partnerships that are win-win between News Corp brands and what we're doing within game - that's the way that we can have an advantage that Zynga doesn't have. Zynga isn't part of a major media company; they're again leader coming out of the first inning of the ball game, but I don't think anybody in their right mind thinks this game is anywhere near over. The world is not becoming less social - you're not going to see people carrying less and weaker devices, playing fewer games five years from now.