Authors:
Eric Nelson Bailey
and
Kazunori Miyata
Affiliation:
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Ishikawa and Japan
Keyword(s):
Video Game Development, Online Multiplayer, Project Scope, Functional Scope, Project Management, Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD).
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Data Mining in Electronic Commerce
;
Information Extraction
;
Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Soft Computing
;
Software Development
;
Symbolic Systems
;
Web Mining
Abstract:
Video game organizations are under pressure from growing development costs and competition from other sources of entertainment. Making informed project scope decisions is critical to avoiding budgetary and schedule waste, but little information regarding best development practices is made public, and many decisions are made, not informed by past data, but by the tacit knowledge of project owners. One way developers have attempted to improve sales on their games and follow-up content is through the inclusion of online multiplayer functionality. However, multiplayer functionality is expensive to develop and can significantly add to the costs and schedule of a game project, particularly if the decision to include it is made late in the process. This research explores publicly available data to discover the value that multiplayer functionality provides so that project owners can make a more informed decision earlier in the development process.