PlayFirst's Mari Baker

That's exactly right. And I think it's interesting that our new game on Facebook is called Chocolatier, and it's about building a chocolate shop and we're adding a few more things into that leverage from our PC download game that are about travelling the world, searching for ingredients, stopping into different ports and stocking different kinds of chocolates. Chocolate is clearly very appealing to women, but I think it's an example of something that plays out more broadly – there are plenty of men who enjoy eating chocolates as well. So it's different from Wedding Dash which is very appealing to women. So one of the messages that we've been talking about is the notion of building brands and building franchises, and I think EA has been very good at that. Their acquisition of Playfish last Fall was all about bringing brands into the Facebook platform. And of course the recent Disney acquisition of Playdom has been all about bringing Disney brands to the Facebook platform.

When I started a year ago in the game space, I didn't hear people talking about brands. It's a world that I've come from, where people think about building brands and the sustainability of that, how you can leverage it more broadly. And so my talk [at GamesCom] was about bringing brands cross-platform. But at the heart of it is really understanding customer needs, building a great product and if you get both of those down then you have the opportunity to build a brand that then has meaning that's associated with it. So we think about Diner Dash – or Dash – as being a time-management brand. When consumers interact with 'Dash' they expect it to be time management. Whether that's Diner Dash or Wedding Dash or Cooking Dash, it's time management. And then the product has done well and we've been able to take it across platforms.

So we relaunched Diner Dash. It was originally launched in the Fall of 2008 and it was done as a port which a) is not a compelling product, even if it's a good fundamental game underneath, but simply porting it over meant the hotspots were too small, they overlapped, the graphics were too small because it just ported the big screen to the small screen. So we relaunched it in January this year... the ported version was around about number 200 on the best-selling chart. The port reached number 2 paid game for a while, and has been staying in certainly the top 50 grossing if not the top 25 grossing since. It was about making it native for the platform. And it's done much, much better.

So when we think about Facebook where we have Chocolatier, we did some research among people who play games on Facebook. Diner Dash already has better brand awareness than things like Happy Aquarium or Mind Jolt, some of the top-flight games on Facebook. So we've been talking a lot about how you have to understand the needs of the customers. So in this case what do 40 year old women seek in the games? Theme is important to that. Creating a compelling product which means polish and gameplay and making it right for the platform and then building a brand off of that. The built-in awareness gives you a little bit of a lift up if you have a great product.

That was a long answer, and only a little bit about women and gaming, huh?

Yeah! [Makes strangled noise.] We keep thinking that maybe they'll send a cheque to us accidentally... [Laughs].

I think that the Facebook-based gaming is real, right. It's 200 million people every day, playing games on Facebook. So that's a real phenomenon. And I'm a believer in the notion that we're at end of the beginning – but we're still at the beginning phases. It's ready to move on, and part of that next phase is about bringing a higher quality of the brands, and a deeper and richer game playing experience. That said, when we speak to consumers, they speak about playing games on Facebook as something to do at work at the end of a project. So they're working on something, maybe writing a story, and at the end they want a little break. And where previously they might have gone out and smoked a cigarette or gone out and got a cup of coffee or maybe gone online and done some shopping, now they're thinking about going and playing a game on Facebook for a few minutes.

They really want a shorter experience, and I think that's part of the next phase. I think that it's real, there's lot of people doing it and it's grown so fast. I mean think about Zynga and Playfish and Playdom – these are companies who are two or three years old. They're tens of millions of dollars in revenue, and worth hundreds or billions in market cap. So it's huge. There's not a lot of other industries that you can name where companies have achieved such scale so quickly. Even in the early days of the internet, you had a Netscape but even that took a long time before Yahoo and some of the other companies coming along. This has happened very, very quickly off the back of Facebook having created an ecosystem.

So when I look at why did EA and Disney buy these companies, I think they also saw there was huge potential. And these are companies who need big scale. Disney needs things that are going to be billions of dollars in revenue and contribute to the growth of the overall corporation in a few years, so I think it makes a lot of sense for them. Playdom of course wanted to get to scale fast, so they bought a whole ton of smaller developers along the way. We'll see what happens at Zynga; they've done some acquisitions, but we'll see how they really approach the changing landscape. I think Crowdstar is another interesting group that hasn't done any acquisitions that I'm aware of to date. I think Crowdstar is now ahead of Playdom for AppData number of users. And that's all natural, organic growth.