Studying the urgent updates of popular games on the Steam platform

Lin, Dayi; Bezemer, Cor‐Paul; Hassan, Ahmed E.

doi:10.1007/s10664-016-9480-2

Cited by 62 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Other studies investigated software engineering aspects by mining data from online game distribution platforms. Lin et al studied the impact of the early access release model [36], emergency updates [35] and reviews [38] of games on the Steam online distribution platform. Cheung et al [13] analyzed over 200 reviews for Xbox 360 games.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The above studies focused on several aspects of games and software engineering, such as software engineering practices applied in game development [19,20,28,44,46,61], limitations of game development [1,30,42], game testing [6,29], empirical insights on game development for game developers [34][35][36][37][38], user views of games [13,15], and potential software engineering research opportunities in games [2,33,54].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Building the perfect game – an empirical study of game modifications

et al. 2020

Self Cite

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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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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building the perfect game – an empirical study of game modifications

et al. 2020

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Enhancements and changes of the underlying base-software are commonly known as software updates or patches and often go hand in hand with a change in version number and a changelog that is generally provided for documentation purposes. Those updates are often based on bug reports or feature requests by users who provide valuable feedback [23], or they come from internal feedback as developers often monitor their back-end processes and try to identify actual or future performance issues or bugs [29]. Technically, software updates and their rollout process have already been discussed in the software development and maintenance literature [39].…”

Section: Software Updatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Influence of Design Updates on Users: the Case of Snapchat

Franzmann¹,

Fischer²,

Holten³

2019

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Today's smartphone apps are regularly updated and enhanced through software updates. The case at hand is the popular social multimedia messaging app Snapchat that released a design overhaul in February 2018. While the update neither changed any features nor caused any relevant bugs or crashes, it led to an uproar of Snapchat's users and significantly decreased its app store ratings and consequently revenue. As a result, Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat, was forced to reverse design changes to appease their users. The initial adverse effects of the update were surprising; however, after using difference-indifference tests in combination with sentiment analysis, our results indicate that design updates can be perceived negatively by users. We contribute to IS literature by evaluating the effect of design changes and the role of perceived ease of use in the post-adoption stage.

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“…Lin et al [31] studied the phenomenon of 0-day updates, i.e., updates aimed at fixing bugs immediately after issuing a release, in the context of games present on the Steam platform. As a key result, they found that 0-day updates are more frequent in games having a frequent update release strategy.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Pascarella

Palomba

Penta

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories

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Recent research has provided evidence that, in the industrial context, developing video games diverges from developing software systems in other domains, such as office suites and system utilities. In this paper, we consider video game development in the open source system (OSS) context. Specifically, we investigate how developers contribute to video games vs. non-games by working on different kinds of artifacts, how they handle malfunctions, and how they perceive the development process of their projects. To this purpose, we conducted a mixed, qualitative and quantitative study on a broad suite of 60 OSS projects. Our results confirm 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. Moreover, game developers responding to our survey perceive more difficulties than other developers when reusing code as well as performing automated testing, and they lack a clear overview of their system's requirements.

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Studying the urgent updates of popular games on the Steam platform

Cited by 62 publications

References 26 publications

Building the perfect game – an empirical study of game modifications

Building the perfect game – an empirical study of game modifications

The Influence of Design Updates on Users: the Case of Snapchat

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

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