When I first started this blog Rupert Murdoch, via his mouthpieces like Fox News and The Times newspaper, was anti gaming. Some of the stories they came up with were ridiculous. You can understand why he was doing this, gaming represented a threat to most of what he owns. Movies, TV channels, newspapers, magazines etc. There is a lot of old media in his portfolio at News Corporation.

Then his media did a quick 180 on gaming and started taking a sensible stance. At around the same time Rupert dipped his toe in the gaming market with a casual gaming portal. I’m not saying that the two events were connected.

Now he appears to be making a big move. MySpace was a Murdoch purchase in 2005, for $580 million. Since which it has gone steadily downhill compared with Facebook and the new upstart, Twitter. You wonder why he bought MySpace in the first place, social networking sites are not exactly cash cows. Now it looks like he has come up with a plan that will get him a massive presence in gaming and a return on his investment in MySpace.

On this blog I have constantly written about the convergence of gaming and social networking. They are headed towards being the same thing. Which is obviously something Rupert also believes in because he is turning MySpace into a gaming platform. A clever move if he pulls it off.

MySpace is still massive, 125 million unique users a month is substantial. If he can capture this audience for gaming we will have something a lot bigger than Xbox Live or Steam or anything else in gaming for that matter. We will have a half billion dollar gaming monster.

Of course Rupert was forced into this. Old media is dying at some speed world wide whilst gaming is growing rapidly. Gaming has the three technology advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity. Old media stands no chance against this. And gaming isn’t just for recreation. Already it has massive uses in education, business and the military. These will grow to be many times bigger than the recreational uses.