

It's tradition in the Game industry to write a "Postmortem" after launch, telling your launch story. - e1ven
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/article_display.php?category=5
Imagine if more startups were this open about their process-
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e1ven
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.

~~~
jcl
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.

~~~
pchristensen
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.

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jcl
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.

~~~
hhm
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.

~~~
zach
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.

~~~
hhm
I agree 100% on this.

