Context:

Given its competitiveness, the video-game industry has a closed-source culture. Hence, little is known about the problems faced by game developers. However, game developers do share information about their game projects through postmortems, which describe informally what happened during the projects.

Objective:

The software-engineering research community and game developers would benefit from a state of the problems of the video game industry, in particular the problems faced by game developers, their evolution in time, and their root causes. This state of the practice would allow researchers and practitioners to work towards solving these problems.

Method:

We analyzed 200 postmortems from 1997 to 2019, resulting in 927 problems divided into 20 types. Through our analysis, we described the overall landscape of game industry problems in the past 23 years and how these problems evolved over the years. We also give details on the most common problems, their root causes, and possible solutions. We finally discuss suggestions for future projects.

Results:

We observe that (1) the game industry suffers from management and production problems in the same proportion; (2) management problems decreased over the years, giving space to business problems, while production problems remained constant; (3a) technical and game design problems are decreasing over the years, the latter only after the last decade; (3b) problems related to the team increase over the last decade; (3c) marketing problems are the ones that had the biggest increase over the 23 years compared to other problem types; (4) finally, the majority of the main root causes are related to people, not technologies. Conclusions: In this paper, we provide a state of the practice for researchers to understand and study video-game development problems. We also offer suggestions to help practitioners to avoid the most common problems in future projects.

中文翻译：

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游戏业问题：对灰色文献的广泛分析

内容：

鉴于其竞争力，视频游戏行业具有封闭源文化。因此，对于游戏开发人员面临的问题知之甚少。但是，游戏开发人员确实会通过验尸来共享有关其游戏项目的信息，这些非正式地描述了项目期间发生的事情。

目的：

软件工程研究社区和游戏开发人员将从视频游戏行业的问题状态中受益，尤其是游戏开发人员面临的问题，他们的时间演变以及根本原因。这种实践状态将使研究人员和从业人员能够致力于解决这些问题。

方法：

我们分析了1997年至2019年的200次验尸，得出了927个问题，分为20种类型。通过我们的分析，我们描述了过去23年中游戏行业问题的总体情况以及这些问题在过去几年中如何演变。我们还将详细介绍最常见的问题，根本原因和可能的解决方案。我们最终讨论对未来项目的建议。

结果：

我们观察到：（1）游戏产业遭受相同比例的管理和生产问题；（2）多年来，管理问题有所减少，为业务问题留出了空间，而生产问题则保持不变；（3a）多年来，技术和游戏设计问题正在减少，后者仅在最近十年之后；（3b）与团队有关的问题在过去十年中有所增加；（3c）营销问题是23年来与其他问题类型相比增长最快的问题；（4）最后，大多数的根本原因与人有关，而不是技术。结论：在本文中，我们为研究人员了解和研究视频游戏开发问题提供了一种实践状态。