Barry Diller's Grand Acquisitor

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• The New IAC
  

Scouting for new Web markets, Fisher's mission at IAC, is "a low volume, high return" business, she says, one that requires patience. "It's not every day you find an industry that hasn't been transformed by the Internet." She routinely kills ideas because the market isn't big enough, a company is overcapitalized, or she senses "it doesn't capture Barry's imagination."

It takes an imaginative leap to see nascent niches and overlooked companies, but her insight is grounded in research. Building on her experience in investment banking, Fisher helped IAC create algorithms that trawl the Web, calculate what she terms a "metabolic rate" for thousands of sites in various industries, and screen the best candidates. She and her team meet weekly to interpret the latest rankings. "The screens help us see growth companies before others see them," she says.

Fisher has been studying the video-game business for years, looking for the right opening in a mature industry. She has talked to the major players and dozens of independent developers and read everything she could get her hands on. She owns an Xbox 360, a PlayStation 2, and a Wii and tries out the new releases. ("The new Halo was mind-blowing," she says.) What the industry lacked, she discovered, was complex, 3-D multiplayer action games to play through a browser, without pricey consoles or downloading hassles. When industry insiders told her such games were too complicated for the Web, she was unconvinced.

Then GarageGames--which was creating not only games, but also popular development tools for independent game ­makers--showed up on the screens last year. Fisher sent Andy Yang, 29, a longtime gamer and computer-science whiz she'd recruited from Ask.com, to approach the company at the Austin Game Conference. When Yang asked the GarageGames folks if they planned to apply the tools to online games, they were coy. "That told us what we needed to know," says Fisher.

GarageGames is due to launch its InstantAction host site with several games in early 2008. Dozens of independent developers--including Alex Seropian, the executive producer of the megahit Halo--are working on new releases for the site. "This could have a watershed effect on the industry," Seropian says. For gamers, Instant-Action offers a convenient place to play games as sophisticated as those for consoles. For independent developers, it promises faster, cheaper, friendlier distribution (developers retain intellectual property rights), plus the ability to continuously tweak the software to improve the experience, which could boost the bottom line. This iterative development also allows GarageGames to experiment with subscriptions, advertising, and microtransactions. "Now the presentations are over," Fisher says. "It has to be a good business."

In Friday's MarbleBlast match, Williams and Yang make short work of Fisher. Although she manages to score a lone point, she's nonetheless pleased. The graphics look vivid. The game is fun to play. She may have lost her marble, but she found a promising business.