For today's interview, we get some advice from veteran game industry recruiter, Marc Mencher. Marc and his staff at GameRecruiter.com have 18 years of experience recruiting the technical, production, and executive talent who make up game industry companies.

Marc and his firm specialize in strategically important and un-advertised jobs in all segments of the game industry. These are the kinds of positions you won't find in the classifieds or on job boards. Marc believes in a career-building approach, rather than placing candidates in one-off positions.

Marc draws on his 25 years of experience to impart advice to anyone looking to get, and keep, a job in the game industry. We discuss the absolutely crucial role of networking, how to introduce and sell yourself at industry events, how to use job postings as a lead source to take control of your job hunt, and how to stand out among the hundreds of candidates applying for a given position.

In separate segments, Marc shares some practical tips on how to break into the game industry, how to build your skills with the goal of assembling the right work samples, and how to start building your industry mentors and contacts. And he gives his opinion on the value of attending a specialized game school.

For those of you with a few releases under your belt, we talk about how to track industry trends very specifically, and how to keep yourself employable and valuable in the market. We also discuss the impact, from a hiring perspective, due to new consoles, production pathways and agile development, outsourcing, and freelancing.

Marc also provides some insight into the career viability of new growth sectors, such as the mobile and MMO markets, and some of the forces defining the influx of talent from other entertainment fields, and the departure of veterans from gaming into other industries. To round out the discussion, Marc shares his take on this year's Game Developer Magazine annual salary survey, and how it stacks up against his experience.

You can now download the Gamasutra Podcast: Interview with Marc Mencher (.MP3, 63 minutes, 29 MB).

In addition, you can subscribe to the GDC Radio 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.

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 pay-to-play MMO company, K2 Network.

In my 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 "Penryn" 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.