[jcl]

I've wondered about the usefulness of the "what went wrong" section of the Game Developer postmortems, given that they are all games that actually shipped. It's possible that the "what went wrong" problems are things that might have jeopardized the project had they been worse. But it's also possible that these problems are simply aspects of successful projects, and that trying to fix them would make the project less likely to succeed.

For example, a lot of postmortems complain about not spending enough time creating artist tools. Does this mean spending a lot of time on tools will make your project more successful? Or does it mean that all the teams that spent enough time on tools didn't have enough resources to complete their projects (and thus didn't get postmortems)?

[jcl]

Or another possibility, which only just occurs to me: Some of these problems are going to be problems on any project, successful or not. So if a project has no major problems, these are the ones that will be mentioned -- Game Developer postmortems require 5 pros and 5 cons.

It's like how you'll rarely hear of a software project that is refactored enough, documented enough, or that has a user interface that everyone is happy with. You could probably spend an entire project's time on artist tools, and they would still be an issue for someone.