Schafer's not the only one comparing games to film. After leaving Vivendi Universal, Michael Pole joined up with former Electronic Arts Los Angeles executives Rick Giolito and Mark Skaggs to form Trilogy Studios. Where his previous position had him reluctantly nixing innovation as an exec at a worldwide publisher, Pole finds the shoe on the other foot now as CEO of a company making an episodic "first-person shooter/RPG combo" for PCs and next-gen systems.
Pole compares the current game industry landscape to that of the movie industry at the height of the studio system.
"They controlled the talent," Pole said of the movie studios. "They controlled the directors. Everybody was under contract, and for the longest time there seemed to be a stifling of creativity underneath that system. What the games industry is finding now is while you can amass an extraordinary collection of talent, extraordinary games are created within small teams. The best new intellectual properties are coming from independent--self-funded for the most part--studios."
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