Clash: Rise of the Heroes

Making Fun, Inc., a division of News Corporation, is the first full-service social games publishing company. We work closely with independent game developers to bring high quality social games to market for consumers to enjoy. Our mission is to work in conjunction with passionate developers in order to publish only the greatest games. To fulfill our mission, we go far beyond simple distribution —

we provide developers capital for both initial and ongoing product development. Not only that, we provide independent developers with a much-needed partner that is as committed as they are to live operations, customer support, marketing and franchise development. Finally, by working with studios across a variety of platforms — including social networks, smartphones and tablets — we are able to deliver games to consumers on their preferred device.

leadership

John Welch
President and Co-Founder

A pioneer of digital entertainment distribution, John Welch’s direction guides Making Fun as it develops best-in-class games across connected platforms. Before joining Making Fun, John served as co-founder and CEO of PlayFirst, the casual games publisher famous for the best-selling Diner Dash franchise. At PlayFirst, John was responsible for the company’s vision, financing, strategic direction and operations.

In a previous role as Vice President of Games and Product at the pioneering online games service Shockwave.com, John was responsible for driving product strategy and acquiring and developing games. Prior to that, John served as Director of Product Development at SegaSoft Online Networks.
John is a past Chair of the IGDA Online Games group, and has been a contributor to its well-received white papers. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from MIT and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts.

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Lee Crawford
Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder

Lee Crawford is a veteran technologist with 20 years of deep domain expertise across online gaming, consumer Internet and electronic commerce. Previously, Lee served as co-founder and CEO of Twofish, a leading virtual economy infrastructure provider acquired by Live Gamer, Inc.

Prior to co-founding Twofish, Lee held the role of CTO of Games at Yahoo, and co-founded Stadeon (acquired by Yahoo) that developed a platform for cross-platform, mobile multi-player games. Lee has also worked as VP of Product and Technology at Trintch and as VP of Engineering at Shockwave.

In addition to his work at Making Fun, Lee currently serves on the advisory board for Masher Media, a company in the kids MMO space which was founded by children’s TV veteran Sherry Gunther. Lee holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Florida State University.

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