Question

“For several years empirical studies have spanned the spectrum of research from software productivity, quality, reliability, performance to human computer interaction. Analyses have involved software systems ranging from desktop software to telecommunication switching systems. But surprising there has been little work done on the emerging digital game industry, one of the fastest growing domains today. To the best of our knowledge, our work is one of the first empirical analysis of a large commercially successful game system”. “In this paper, we introduce an analysis of the significant user data generated in the gaming industry by using a successful game: Project Gotham Racing 4. More specifically, due to the increasing ubiquity of constantly connected high-speed internet connections for game consoles, developers are able to collect extensive amounts of data about their games following release. The challenge now is to make sense of that data, and from it be able to make recommendations to developers. This paper presents an empirical case study analyzing the data collected from a released game over a three year period. The results of this analysis include a better understanding of the differences between long-term and short-term players, and the extent to which various options in the game are utilized. This led to recommendations for future development ways to reduce development costs and to keep new players engaged. A secondary goal for this paper is to introduce software game development as a topic of importance to the empirical software engineering community and discuss research results on a key difference area: data analytics on user data to customize user and development experiences” (Hullett, Nagappan, Schuh and Hopson, 2012)

1) What is the research approach used in this study?

2) What are the key findings from this study?

3) Who are the key people who will benefit from this study? Please use suitable examples.

4) In your opinion, what are the potential drawbacks of case study approach?

Answer 1

1) This is a form of data analysis form of research approach which focuses on inductive research wherein there is collection of empirical data, and this data acts as a guide to generate hypotheses and theory.

2) Key findings from this study are that there is a difference between long term and short term players. How they utilise the several options and are engaged and how much overall time do they spend on playing.

3) The game players will benefit from this study and the game programmers such as software enginnering students who will benefit in terms of monetary aspects as players will find the game interactive and with more improvements which will increase the demand of such programmers.

4) Potential drawbacks are that there is a high likelihood that several gamers behave in a different way and there are chances that more than one person can play at the same console, this reduces efficiency and collection as the data can be incorrect and would not capture the true sense of the players.

There could be too much generalisation and framing of the software based on some key players and is very time consuming, it took 3 years in this study itself to collect sufficient data.