A Survey on a State of the Practice in Video Game Development

Abstract Video Game Software Development is a promisingarea of empirical research because our rst obser-vations in industry environment identi ed a lackof a systematic process and method support andrarely conducted/documented studies. Neverthe-less, video games - speci c types of software prod-ucts - focus strongly on user interface and gamedesign. Thus, engineering processes, methods forgame construction and veri cation/validation, andbest-practices, derived from traditional software en-gineering, might be applicable in context of videogame development. We selected the Austrian gamesindustry as a manageable and promising startingpoint for systematically capturing the state-of-thepractice in Video game development. In this paperwe present the survey design and report on the rstresults of a national survey in the Austrian gamesindustry. The results of the survey showed that theAustrian games industry is organized in a set ofsmall and young studios with the trend to ad-hocand exible development processes and limitationsin systematic method support.