Making Fun's John Welch

No, really when I say 'global' I mean 'US and global.' Of our first three deals, one of them is a Seattle-based company, one is Bay-area based with a team in Eastern Europe and one of them is in Canada. So it's really spread. And then the teams we're talking to are... a couple are in Southern California, but as well South America. So really global. What I've found in my experience having done publishing in online games for the last ten years is you get that creativity from outside teams, the kind of scrappiness. They can developer games more cost-effectively than you can when you're a bigger company. They're a small team, they're wholly focused, they're passionate about they do, they don't worry about some of the things that other companies have to worry about and be more formal about. So it really could be a win-win.

I will tell you though - it's harder. It's actually a lot easier to develop a game in-house, because I could walk up and see what the programmer's doing and talk to them, I can see it on a daily basis. In the external model you've got to have a great producer on your side who has a really good producer on the other side. Our methodology is we try and develop close relationships between the tech leads on both sides, because of the service platform technology approach we take. We assign a senior engineer to every project, a direct relationship with the tech lead on the other side. They have Skype windows open constantly, collaborating really closely.

Yeah, we're about 14 or so now, looking to get up to 20 pretty quickly, but again the great advantage of the external model is we don't need to get that big, because we're employing more people on the outside right now by at least a factor of two.

It's really great, actually. I didn't know much about News Corp before we were acquired, but what I've learned is you discuss your expectations on a sort of annual basis, and then you go and execute. We check in from time-to-time, but it's much less even than what a board of directors type situation would be, or a venture-backed company. We're kind of tucked up into working with IGN more on a facilities and IP and legal kind of basis, getting those kinds of services, and office space. But really Making Fun is an independent company that has its mission and is off executing it. If we do well, we'll hopefully continue to grow.

I think that News Corp wants to succeed in online gaming, and believe that online gaming has some potential. Obviously you don't have to have much inside information to know that there are companies making some good money in the social games space, and to understand that the traditional games industry is having some problems. Personally, I've been ranting about the death of the console for the last five years. I think it's kind of ludicrous that we have three gods you can pray to get your interactive content on the living room screen. You pray to the gods of Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, otherwise you're out of luck. We've seen what happens when companies democratise a gaming platform like the iPhone and now Android mobile devices and tablets. Again, you have this notion of a global development community able to creative without asking permission.

I'm not speaking for News Corp, I'm speaking for John Welch here, but my passion for being part of a company like News Corp where I have resources is to be able to leverage the more democratised platforms to get content on a mobile handset, on game-capable platforms.

The mobile handsets now, it's almost misleading to call them mobile handsets. They're personal computers you put in your pocket, they're increasingly gaming platforms. And the living room screen is, I would imagine, going to be opened up shortly, whether it's Google or Apple, again in a more democratised fashion where you don't have to pray to the gods of the game platform companies to get your content on screen. I think when we do that, that internet notion of creativity without permission, that's what gave us Google, what gave us Facebook and Zynga. You can go on back to Netscape and Yahoo. These are companies started by very small teams who just did something kinda elegant and cool because they could, and it took off.

I think we are going to do some different things. First and foremost, we're not even playing the game in the first innings of the social games. Zynga won that one. They came in and established ways of doing things and kinds of games, and they built a hell of a great business. If we're going to come in and do what they did, I think that would be a losing proposition. We're not here to copy anybody's tech or anybody's game designs or anything like that. What we're doing first and foremost is making better games. I think the second innings of social games is going to be defined by people making real games, or at least starting to make real games. And you have real developers doing it now too - folks like John Romero's team coming in and making Ravenwood Fair. That was his first attempt - that was a couple of weeks project for him. And I'm hoping you'll see more creative stuff, that's more real gaming from teams like that. I know my team is here to make real games.

Our first game out, which I can't say too much about, it's going to do something pretty revolutionary in the social games space: it has an ending. Name another social game that ends. You know you play a console game and it ends - you get the satisfaction of going "I finished it!", staying up until 3 AM with it so you can brag to your friends about it. And that bragging to your friends is marketing the game for us, right? With social games, everybody who stops playing kind of does it because they get sick of it - that's not the way that I want to leave my customers when they finished an experience that they may have paid me money for, or at least a lot of their time. I want them to have a sense of accomplishment.

Real games have tension between the easy thing that's safe and the risky thing that has a better pay-off. There's no tension in social games. I'm not saying we're going to do a Call of Duty on Facebook, what I'm saying is we're going to use the techniques from the traditional game world in the right ways for social. Innovative ways. And we're going to do something that is wild and crazy and you'll be like "are you kidding me, what is that?", and we'll do some things that are maybe less innovative but maybe get a new market. One common theme for us on top of making better games is every game has a very strong market thesis. We're not here to make Fox IP - although I'd be open to doing some things there - we're here to make great games where every single game we greenlight has a very specific target demographic and market thesis - generally speaking, some advantage in marketing. Do I want to come into this market with zero users in my network, and compete with Zynga by buying Facebook ads? No.