Adoption of Requirements Engineering Methods in Game Development: A Literature and Postmortem Analysis

As the game industry continues to grow in size and revenue, the cost of creating games increases as well, and the successful outcome of game development projects becomes ever more important. In traditional software engineering, it is generally agreed that a successful requirements engineering process has a significant impact on the project. In game development, requirements engineering methods do not seem to be commonly used. As the development of digital games includes specialized aspects of software development, it seems likely that game developers could benefit from adopting these techniques and processes. In this paper, a thorough reading of central and current academic research on the topic is performed to form a holistic picture of the central issues and problems preventing the adoption and widespread use of requirements engineering processes and methods in game development. Additionally, algorithmic analysis of 340 post-mortems written by game developers and published on industry websites is conducted. These post-mortems discuss the factors which contributed to or hindered the successful outcome of these game development projects, and the analysis further supports the identified central issues.