"Inovation's dead, dying. Every once in a while, somebody will slip something in that will shock us, but for the most part there's no money in innovation, even if it's great," said Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter. "Now we've got how many more World War II games coming out?" Michael Pole, an executive vice president at Vivendi when Schafer was doing Psychonauts, said he badly wanted to work with Schafer, but the greenlighting process at publishers is simply not conducive to products that are so different. Psychonauts did get picked up by Majesco, but essentially bombed at retail despite plenty of positive press and gamer anticipation. Schafer thinks part of the problem is how the retail system works. Even right at the game's launch, there were indeed many reports of the game being simply impossible to find because stores either didn't order any copies, or only ordered enough for the meager preorders. I made similar observations in a Shack editorial.

"There are a lot of things about the film industry we kind of aspire to, like some of the funding models that give more control to creative talent, innovative financing and things like that," Schafer says. "But there's a part of me that also looks at the film industry and [sees] it's not super great right now, either. It's not a hotbed for innovation either. But it does have an independent film machine that's viable, and that's something gaming doesn't really have. In film, you can have the independent movie win best film of the year at the Oscars. But there's not really a chance that one of those indie games is going to knock out Halo, you know."

Pole also likens the situation to film, comparing the current games industry to old studio-dominated Hollywood, in which directors simply made movies on demand to fit market-researched specifications--much how the current publisher/developer relationship works now. Companies like Elevation hope to give more control to developers while still maintaining financial security, but that endeavor has its own set of problems. Will the situation improve like it arguably has in film? Maybe, but let's hope it doesn't take half a century this time.