How is video game development different from software development in open source?

Pascarella, Luca; Palomba, Fabio; Penta, Massimiliano Di; Bacchelli, Alberto

doi:10.1145/3196398.3196418

Cited by 53 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Several studies investigated open source game projects to relate them to software engineering aspects (Ahmed et al 2017;Pascarella et al 2018). For instance, Pascarella et al (2018) investigated how the developers contribute to video games in an open source setting.…”

Section: Games and Software Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

An empirical study of the characteristics of popular Minecraft mods

et al. 2020

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It is becoming increasingly difficult for game developers to manage the cost of developing a game, while meeting the high expectations of gamers. One way to balance the increasing gamer expectation and development stress is to build an active modding community around the game. There exist several examples of games with an extremely active and successful modding community, with the Minecraft game being one of the most notable ones.This paper reports on an empirical study of 1,114 popular and 1,114 unpopular Minecraft mods from the CurseForge mod distribution platform, one of the largest distribution platforms for Minecraft mods. We analyzed the relationship between 33 features across 5 dimensions of mod characteristics and the popularity of mods (i.e., mod category, mod documentation, environmental context of the mod, remuneration for the mod, and community contribution for the mod), to understand the characteristics of popular Minecraft mods. We firstly verify that the studied dimensions have significant explanatory power in distinguishing the popularity of the studied mods. Then we evaluated the contribution of each of the 33 features across the 5 dimensions. We observed that popular mods tend to have a high quality description and promote community contribution.

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Section: Games and Software Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

An empirical study of the characteristics of popular Minecraft mods

et al. 2020

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“…Several studies mined data from game projects to study software engineering aspects. For example, Ahmed et al [1] and Pascarella et al [44] analyzed open source game projects. Graham and Roberts [19] and Köhler et al [29] studied the development of their own game, whereas Guana et al [20] studied the development of their own game engine.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building the perfect game – an empirical study of game modifications

et al. 2020

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Prior work has shown that gamer loyalty is important for the sales of a developer's future games. Therefore, it is important for game developers to increase the longevity of their games. However, game developers cannot always meet the growing and changing needs of the gaming community, due to the often already overloaded schedules of developers. So-called modders can potentially assist game developers with addressing gamers' needs. Modders are enthusiasts who provide modifications or completely new content for a game. By supporting modders, game developers can meet the rapidly growing and varying needs of their gamer base. Modders have the potential to play a role in extending the life expectancy of a game, thereby saving game developers time and money, and leading to a better overall gaming experience for their gamer base.In this paper, we empirically study the metadata of 9,521 mods that were extracted from the Nexus Mods distribution platform. The Nexus Mods distribution platform is one of the largest mod distribution platforms for PC games at the time of our study. The goal of our paper is to provide useful insights about mods on the Nexus Mods distribution platform from a quantitative perspective, and to provide researchers a solid foundation to further explore game mods. To better understand the potential of mods to extend the longevity of a game we study their characteristics, and we study their release schedules and post-release support (in terms of bug reports) as a proxy for the willingness of the modding community to contribute to a game. We find that

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“…According to Kalliamvakou et al [10], these variables help to avoid perils while performing software engineering research on GitHub. Moreover, we took inspiration from the methodology adopted by Pascarella et al [13]. Authors included the same number of projects in their comparative analysis of video games and non-video games OSS projects.…”

Section: Threats To Validity a Sample Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Concerning sotfware mining, as mentioned before, the methodology followed in this work took inspiration from the work of Pascarella et al [13], in the video games OSS context. The authors conducted a study on 60 projects, and their results confirmed the existence of significant differences between game and non-game development, in terms of how project resources are organized and in the diversity of developers specializations.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

How is Open Source Software Development Different in Popular IoT Projects?

2020

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From the software point of view, the development of IoT applications differs from other kinds of applications due to the specific features that the former exhibit. In this paper, we investigate how developers contribute to IoT applications in the Open Source Software (OSS) context, to gain a deeper understanding of how their work differs from that of non-IoT applications. To that end, we conducted a quantitative analysis of a broad set of the 60 most popular publicly available IoT and non-IoT projects on GitHub. By comparing how developers contribute to these projects, our analysis provides insight into the purpose and characteristics of the code, the behavior of the contributors, and the maturity of the IoT software development ecosystem. Results reveal significant differences between IoT and non-IoT application development, in terms of how applications are realized, in the diversity of developers' specializations, and in how code is reused. This work provides evidence about some Open Source IoT software development peculiarities to be considered by future research efforts aimed at better satisfying software engineering needs in the IoT scenario. INDEX TERMS Internet of Things, open source software, software mining, developers.

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How is video game development different from software development in open source?

Cited by 53 publications

References 37 publications

An empirical study of the characteristics of popular Minecraft mods

An empirical study of the characteristics of popular Minecraft mods

Building the perfect game – an empirical study of game modifications

How is Open Source Software Development Different in Popular IoT Projects?

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