Game industry problems: An extensive analysis of the gray literature

Given its competitiveness, the video-game industry has a closed-source culture. Hence, little is known about problems faced by game developers. However, developers do share information their projects through postmortems, which describe informally what happened during projects. The software-engineering research community and would benefit from state of video industry, in particular developers, evolution time, root causes. This practice allow researchers practitioners to work towards solving these problems. We analyzed 200 postmortems 1997 2019, resulting 927 divided into 20 types. Through our analysis, we described overall landscape past 23 years how evolved over years. also give details on most common problems, causes, possible solutions. finally discuss suggestions for future observe that (1) suffers management production same proportion; (2) decreased years, giving space business while remained constant; (3a) technical design are decreasing latter only after last decade; (3b) related team increase (3c) marketing ones had biggest compared other problem types; (4) finally, majority main causes people, not technologies. Conclusions: In this paper, provide understand study development offer help avoid