Problems Preventing the Adoption of Requirements Engineering Methods in Game Development

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 (or lack thereof) has a significant impact in the outlook and outcome of the project. The methods and processes employed in requirements engineering have been discussed, debated and fine-tuned over decades of use, and can be successfully utilized in both traditional waterfall type software development projects, as well as agile and lean projects, which game development usually falls under. Yet in game development, requirements engineering methods do not seem to be commonly used in any way. As game development is a specialized form of software development, it seems intuitively likely that game developers could benefit from adopting these techniques and processes. Clearly, then, something is preventing them from utilizing these methods and processes which could help them, but what? This thesis explores the issue by performing a thorough reading of central and current academic research on the topic, and attempts to form a holistic picture of the issues and problems preventing the adoption and widespread use of requirements engineering processes and methods in game development. In addition to identifying these central problems and issues, the thesis also attempts to verify the existence of these problems by conducting an algorithmic analysis of 315 post-mortems written by game developers and published on industry websites. These post-mortems discuss the factors which contributed to or hindered the successful outcome of these game development projects. They could therefore offer evidence either for or against the significance of these problems and issues