ngmoco boss Neil Young

No. What I read is the question is whether or not DeNA or Gree have prevented developers from doing things on their platform if they signed up to the other person's platform. That's not really a consideration here. I don't think we would ever say to a developer "hey, be on our platform but if you have the game on our platform you can't have it on A.N.Other platform, in the same way that Apple probably couldn't or wouldn't say that about a game being on iOS or Android.

But that may have been incentives. There's a difference between incentives and prevention. So I don't really know.

I think that are different elements that you could consider competitive. I think at the end of the day probably we'll be slugging it out with Zynga. Basically that's what it's going to boil down - Neil and Mark Pincus in a ring going [throws punches].

[Laughs] Yeah, they're formidable competitors. We have a lot of respect for them, and they've built an incredible company, so we'll see. Maybe we can all just make nice and have our games on each other's platforms.

Sure, we'd be open to that. I know Mark pretty well, he is a great guy. Despite what you've read about him in the press, he's actually a good guy.

That's nonsense. You can't do games without brands? Of course you can do games without brands. We have a lot of successful games that don't have brands. That's the mistake that a lot of incumbents in traditional media and traditional games makes - the power of their brand is the thing that's going to lift them above the competition. Actually, I think it's about the relationship with the customer. The intellectual property that is the most valuable is that relationship. I think brands will come to the networks that have the most relationships with customers.

A different way of answering that question is that I think brands will find it difficult to be successful if they're not part of companies that have access to audience. Now, if you can put those two things together successfully, then that's an even better recipe for success. Still have to make a great game, but combine it with a great brand and a better network and that's probably a better shot than going to the other end of the spectrum: no brand, shit game, no network.

Yeah. That's happened all the time too - you can go through the history of the games business and there's been plenty of brands that have slapped themselves on products and the outcome has been mediocre. You can't compensate for that game. Critical success is important because it allows you to have future commercial success. You can sort of fool customers once, but you can't fool them a second time.

You need to do C) all of the above. If you just execute and iterate you will be able to build a big company that will be short-lived, because it will ultimately get out-innovated by someone. If you just do innovation without the ability to execute, you will build a small company that never reaches any scale. So the challenge is how do you do both of those things. We try to, and there's different moments where we're just executing, and others where we're just innovating, but we think that they're both important. The day that innovation stops inside the walls of the company is gonna be the day that it declines. We have to make sure that day never happens.