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