Gamasutra Podcast: Intel Talks Games, K2 CEO Talks Free Play

Gamasutra is proud to present the latest Gamasutra Podcast, part of our weekly podcasts, which include both the Tom Kim-presented Gamasutra Podcast show, alongside the best lectures, tutorials, and roundtables from this and previous years' Game Developers Conferences. For today's show, we feature two interviews from the Game Developer's Conference. The first is with Dan Snyder, the PR Manager of Intel Corporation and the second is with Joshua Hong, the CEO and founder of free-to-play MMO company, K2 Network. In our interview with Dan, we discuss Intel's resurgence and refocus in the gaming market and community. Dan addresses Epic VP Mark Rein's statement that Intel is killing PC gaming, speaking in particular about the bad rap of integrated graphics and its impact on game developer's market presence. He also comments on Intel's work to improve support, providing more robust and efficient drivers and working with game developers to achieve the best possible performance on Intel hardware including development on multi-core processors on multiple threads. Finally, he addresses some of Intel's plans for the future including the next generation of 45nm "Penren" processors, new mobility tools and integrated SLI in notebooks, their new streaming Symbion instruction set, SSE4 with 50 new instructions, many of which have direct applications to gaming, and their functioning 80-core prototype chip set. Joshua Hong talks about how MMO companies should be service companies as much as they address development and publishing. He talks about the importance and difficulties of maintaining a thriving gaming community, especially when that community comprises between 8 - 9 million users worldwide. Joshua explains how K2 is introducing free-to-play model and adapting the service to Western tastes. He explains how free-to-play is more than a pricing structure, but how it has significant implications for distribution, product development and service as well. And how selling in-game items is not limiting game play, but is actually empowering choice by enabling customers to shape their experience to their personal level of comfort or commitment. In other words, to only have to pay for the content they want to experience. He also expresses K2's philosophy regarding their product portfolio, and how their business model allows for continuous yearly, monthly, and even daily enhancements and expansions to the game. You can now download the Gamasutra Podcast: GDC 2007 Interviews with Dan Snyder of Intel and Joshua Hong of K2 Network (.MP3, 35 minutes, 16.1 MB). In addition, you can subscribe to the Gamasutra podcasts by clicking this link for iTunes. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.