John S. Riccitiello
Analyst · Cowen and Company
So top line for me on this. So first off, we're the leader in all mobile iOS and Android on a 2011 basis. We're second in social. Our competitors in San Francisco have a very strong lead in social, and best I can tell, they are #2 in mobile and my guess is we're going to trade leads and we're going to gain share in social. So I guess the first observation is that a very large portion of the business comes from just the 2 of us, and I think we're pretty well capitalized. Here, just not to disagree with the thesis, but I think there's a lot coming from the leading players. As is, I would expect it to consolidate more and more around leading players, leading brands taking more and more share. In terms of acquisition, to be honest with you, I'm pretty anxious about acquiring instant one hit wonders in the space. There's an awful lot of noise that grows up around individual franchises that rises, less so in that individual franchise when it declines. A lot of times, I think when people are acquiring individual new intellectual properties in mobile and social, they try to put an earnings multiple on it, should be a 10x or 20x. But the problem is to put anything on it more than a 3x or 4x, you have to have a belief that this thing is going to last a very, very long time. If something is going to come and go in 3 or 4 years, you can't put a multiple, you've got to add up 3 or 4 years profitability to figure out what to pay for it and then do some sort of a risk-adjusted discount on that. We actually think with Sims, SimCity, what we've got in Bejeweled and the rest of the PopCap IP, we are blessed with an unbelievable portfolio of brand. We don't need to buy a brand just to get a temporary lead on top of the charts for whatever is hot this quarter. That doesn't mean that we would never buy or never invest. We would. But right now, what I'm starting to see is valuation expectations that assume that these things are all hockey stick moving up into the right with no end in sight, and I think those are bad assumptions. Some of them will work, some of them won't, but they can't all be worth the multiple that I'm seeing in the market right now.