Dataset of Video Game Development Problems

Politowski, Cristiano; Petrillo, Fábio; Ullmann, Gabriel C.; Werly, Josias de Andrade; Guéhéneuc, Yann‐Gaël

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2001.00491

Cited by 2 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…We analyse 200 postmortems written between 1997 and 2019 available in our public dataset [22] of grey literature related to game development. These postmortems include 927 problems divided in 20 types.…”

Section: Methodmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Game engines are few and include Unity, Unreal, and proprietary, closed-source engines, built by game studios. Although open source, Godot 22 is not yet as mature as its proprietary counterparts [21]. Developers may consider building their own game engine but should carefully assess the benefits and the risks in doing so.…”

Section: "Your Game Engine Shapes Your Entire Development and Limits ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Game Industry Problems: an Extensive Analysis of the Gray Literature

Politowski¹,

Petrillo²,

Ullmann³

et al. 2020

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Context: Given its competitiveness, the video-game industry has a closed-source culture. Hence, little is known of the problems faced by game developers. However, game developers do share information about their games 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 video game development, 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 more than 200 postmortems, comprising 927 problems divided in 20 types from 1997 to 2019. Through our analysis, we describe 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 provide recommendations for future projects.Results: We observe that (1) the game industry suffer 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 later 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 recommendations to help practitioners to avoid the most common problems in future projects.

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Section: Methodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: "Your Game Engine Shapes Your Entire Development and Limits ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Game Industry Problems: an Extensive Analysis of the Gray Literature

Politowski¹,

Petrillo²,

Ullmann³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…• Postmortems of video-game projects -We used a database of postmortems [3] and kept only the ones related to testing. We analyzed each one of them and extracted the root cause of the problems.…”

Section: B Gray Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the game industry, the first impression is of utmost importance; therefore, only high-quality games can expect to succeed. In December of 2020, the game "Cyberpunk 2077" 1 was released after seven years of development 2 , hundreds of millions of dollars 3 , multiple delays 4 , and high expectations. Upon release, it immediately received strong criticism for its "buggy state" and, no long after, it was even removed from the PlayStation Store 5 because it was not delivering the expected experience to its users, causing revenue loss and other collateral effects, like loss of prestige and good-will for the company CD Projekt Red 6 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey of Video Game Testing

Politowski¹,

Petrillo²,

Guéhéneuc³

2021

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Video-game projects are notorious for having dayone bugs, no matter how big their budget or team size. The quality of a game is essential for its success. This quality could be assessed and ensured through testing. However, to the best of our knowledge, little is known about video-game testing. In this paper, we want to understand how game developers perform game testing. We investigate, through a survey, the academic and gray literature to identify and report on existing testing processes and how they could automate them. We found that game developers rely, almost exclusively, upon manual play-testing and the testers' intrinsic knowledge. We conclude that current testing processes fall short because of their lack of automation, which seems to be the natural next step to improve the quality of games while maintaining costs. However, the current game-testing techniques may not generalize to different types of games.

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Dataset of Video Game Development Problems

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Game Industry Problems: an Extensive Analysis of the Gray Literature

Game Industry Problems: an Extensive Analysis of the Gray Literature

A Survey of Video Game Testing

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