So apparently people actually spend both a lot of time and a lot of money playing Farmville. And now News Corporation wants in on that social gaming cash cow.
According to Natalie Apostolou at The Register, News Corp’s head of digital media Jonathan Miller told the Abu Dhabi media summit that “social gaming has a business model” and they want to play in that space.
The good news for Farmville fans is that Miller ruled out the idea of buying developer Zynga, instead opting to create a new business leveraging current News Corp assets IGN and Making Fun. Given how the whole MySpace thing went down, there are undoubtedly a whole heap of Facebook farmers out there feeling like they just dodged a bullet.
Steve Tran
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 7:56 PMZynga is so ridiculously over-valued now that any business decision by News Corp will end badly. They’ll spend billions of dollars to compete with Zynga, only to realise it was a stock-printing machine held together with duct tape and dental floss.