Imagine if more startups were this open about their process. I'd love to see Sergey write "What went right, What went wrong, and here's how we made it through"
We see this occasionally on the company's Blog, or in a book written years after launch, but I'd love to see a tradition like this catch on more widely.
One problem with these postmortems is that they are biased: successful products are more likely to get postmortems than unsuccessful ones, partly because the public is more interested in products they have heard of and partly because the creators would rather not publicize failure.
But a postmortem of an unsuccessful product made by otherwise-competent developers could be more instructive than a postmortem of a successful product, especially in the "what went wrong" section. The book "Dreaming in Code" feels like such a postmortem, and I think I learned more from it than from the various Game Developer postmortems I have read.
I personally would be interested in reading a "Founders at Work" style book about successful entrepreneurs who have had earlier or later failures. I don't know of too many off the top of my head though.
More like: It's a tradition in Game Developer Magazine to solicit Postmortems from game developers. The articles on Gamasutra are from old GDM issues. I have a feeling that some of the games listed wouldn't have postmortems at all if GDM did not provide this free publicity.
It's interesting that the game industry is one of the few places where it is accepted (and even desirable) to publicly list the things that went wrong when developing a product.
Shrink-wrap software games are unique in that way: By the time a list of all the bugs, glitches and development snafus is published, the primary revenue for the product has already been earned.
When any other piece of software would be worried about its v2.0 reputation, a game will be sitting forlorn on the discount remainder rack, discarded by its creator.
My (very limited) experience in the game development industry was that it was half way between academia and traditional software companies. I think what drives this is that the problems are much harder, and there are so many different types of problems, that developers from different companies are more willing to share ideas and experiences with each other simply as a survival mechanism.
Many people consider "writing a postmortem of the product" part of the game development process, even though not all those do. In any case, I don't think it's a GDM-only phenomenom.
Sure, but publishing them (and the particular format they use) is something Game Developer has advanced more than anyone else in games. It's become their hallmark.
We see this occasionally on the company's Blog, or in a book written years after launch, but I'd love to see a tradition like this catch on more widely.