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[Ammypendent]

The Game Outcomes Project - Pt 1 Link to the article.

What do you think of these findings?

The results of production methodology was pretty interesting. I didn't expect there to be almost no difference between waterfall and the agile variants.

I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the results when it gets published next month. Perhaps it'll shed light in how we can improve our chances in creating successful games.

[jgrams]

Cool to see the data: I'll be interested to see the rest of the results.

But I'm not sure what rock they've been hiding under to think those two results are surprising.

I had the impression that we've known for at least a decade or two that incentives only work well in specific situations and for specific people (e.g. sales commissions), and that they tend to be a miserable failure for programmers and artists and such creative types.

And as for methodologies...agile is about staying flexible and reducing the cost of changes that you didn't (or couldn't) anticipate. But there are plenty of games out there for which the waterfall model could be an excellent fit: if you're making Need For Speed #17 and know the territory inside and out, why wouldn't you take advantage of that to plan things out in detail? I'd expect the effect of methodology to be much more about choosing the right one for your project and having effective managers for that style.

[Ammypendent]

Game Outcomes Project Part II: Building Effective Teams

Another part has been released. I find this more interesting since a number of factors have pretty strong correlations with very small p-values.

A very important takeaway from this part:

[one of our findings] seems to be telling us something: teams with a clear vision don’t always succeed, but teams without a clear vision almost always fail.

In other words, you can’t guarantee success, but you can certainly guarantee failure.

[Ammypendent]

Just posting here to let people know that the rest of the study's findings have been posted.

Game Outcomes Project Part III - Game Development Factors
Looks into which factors have the highest correlation (both positively and negatively).

Game Outcomes Project Part IV - Crunch makes Games Worse
A great in-depth analysis showing that crunch doesn't help a game project at all and even debunks the "game salvage" counterargument, showing that even projects that aren't in trouble don't benefit from it. What does have benefit are times that people voluntarily working extra hours without pressure.


Game Outcomes Project Part V - What Great Teams Do
The conclusion of the study. This summarizes how the culture of the most successful projects are like. Totally worth the read!

They also released the data so you can analyze it yourself if you really want to.