Developer turnover in open source video games
Lonnie. Bowe · 2011
Many video games go over budget, are released late and are plagued with problems. Little work has been done on the causes of these problems as the video game industry is reluctant to allow researchers access to their work. The majority of the literature on the subject comes from the developers themselves, in the form of qualitative “post-mortem” accounts of the development process. These accounts can be problematic and lack reproducibility. Even so, many of these “post-mortem” accounts list personnel turnover as a major problem. Using Open Source games from public source code management systems, we empirically investigate the comparability of Open Source projects to commercial products in regard to developer turnover.We found that most Open Source games are comprised of small groups of developers and that inside these groups there are developers who consistently contribute the largest amount of code to the project. Using a convention from the literature, we call these developers the “core group”. We found that members of these “core groups” regularly leave the project. We argue that these findings provide us a plausible basis for comparison to commercially developed games. We discuss the implications of our findings, as well as future projects and applications of the study.