Gamasutra is proud to present the latest Gamasutra Podcast, part of our regular weekly GDC Radio 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 an extensive interview with Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter.

His unvarnished opinions and gutsy predictions have garnered him and his firm a high profile among the gaming community.

But, says Pachter in the course of the interview, "I don't solicit all this press coverage. The press finds me. I think that the press finds me because I'm colorful, I'm not shy, I have an opinion and I frankly really don't care if someone agrees or disagrees with it. I'm willing to share."

"The controversy - the invective - that I get comes primarily from the games industry people always writing me emails and asking me, 'what do you think about this?' You know, 'what do you think when one of your competitors said "something"' that I thought was stupid. I wrote back that the guy was naive. And boy, headline: 'Pachter calls other analyst naive.' Today someone asked me, 'what do you think about the Sega marketing guy saying the Wii is a fad,' and I responded. Boy, headline."

We talk about the method behind his madness, delving into some of the thinking and methodology behind his analysis. He talks about how his coverage of the entertainment sector, and games in particular, differs from other categories covered by sales side analysts. We discuss his thoughts on investor-friendly publishing and consumer desire, and why the two might not be mutually exclusive.

In true Pachter-ian fashion, he straightforwardly addresses his cult of personality among message boards and gaming communities.

"I publish my monthly console and handheld hardware numbers because the NeoGAF guys think it's so fun," says Pachter of the infamous messageboard. "But no one's ever asked to see my annual forecast for all those things. I'm spot on, for my annual forecast. I'd love to see those guys put out a contest for annual forecasts for the next five years and then we'll compare my numbers to theirs, because I've been spot on for five or six years now."

"The average NeoGAF visitor isn't equipped to actually prepare those things," says Pachter, "because it requires you to make an assumption about pricing, and I've been great on that as well. It's hard to do."

Pachter shares some of his biggest industry surprises of the past few years, and his personal pick for most under-rated company in the game industry:

"I love the innovation. I love the opportunistic rapid market response. I think this company's going to earn a lot more money than most people do."

And, finally, responds to earlier comments he's made that next-gen game prices are too low and that "consumers are getting a gift":

"I'm just making an economic argument, not so much a suggestion," says Pachter. "[Prices of next-gen games] aren't going up. You're seeing collectors editions at $70 -- you're seeing the GTA collector's at $90. Guitar Hero -- $90. People don't even blink. They stand in line for the thing."

"I just meant that the public is willing to spend more for the content that they want," he adds. "Again, adjusted for inflation, the old PSone game in 1995 that came out at $49.99 would be probably about 70 bucks right now, just at 3 percent inflation compounded for the last 12 years, you'd be up over $70. On an apples to apples basis, $60 is a bargain. And the content of a PS3 game is a lot greater, or an Xbox 360 game, than the content of the first generation PSone games."

You can now download the Gamasutra Podcast: Interview with Michael Pachter (.MP3, 48 minutes, 22 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.

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Gamasutra is proud to present the latest Gamasutra Podcast, part of our regular weekly GDC Radio 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 an interview with Kane Minkus, principal and founder of Somatone Interactive Audio.

Although you might not be familiar with Somatone, you are probably quite familiar with their work. Somatone scores and produces music, sound effects, and voice overs for over 120 titles a year, including some of your favorite console, casual and downloadable games, such as EA's Medal of Honor series, PlayFirst's Diner Dash series, 3-Rings' best of IGF winner, Bang Howdy, and PopCap's fiendishly addictive Peggle.

Not only does Somatone handle music composition, sound design, voice overs, and mixing and mastering, but they are also responsible for developing a highly optimized, high quality sound and music technology specifically tailored for downloadable games.

In the interview, Kane talks about his motivation for starting up Somatone, specifically with an eye, or ear, toward servicing the game industry. Kane explains how their movement into the downloadable casual space has been a great challenge to the sound designers and composers at Somatone in terms of the breadth of styles and the diversity of the audience for those games. Also, how Somatone's tight integration of technology for their clients allows them a more cooperative and creative role in working with the game development team.

He addresses some of the technical considerations in the development of their audio technology for downloadables, and how it shapes the feature set of their production tools. The end result being a highly optimized, very efficient and surprisingly flexible solution.

Kane also talks about some of the unique process that Somatone applies to score games, including their use of Laban Movement Analysis, a systematic means of describing and deconstructing motion. Finally, he talks about the musical inspiration behind the score for Peggle, which turns out to have the same controlled randomness as the game itself.

You can now download the Gamasutra Podcast: Interview with Kane Minkus (.MP3, 36 minutes, 16 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.

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