How Game Studios Learn From Failed Projects

Ryan Cole May 25, 2026 (Updated Jul 8, 2026) 2 min read · Fact-checked & reviewed

How Game Studios Learn From Failed Projects

You shipped the game. Or maybe you cancelled it. Either way, the team is exhausted, some people have already moved on to new projects, and someone in leadership is asking for a post-mortem document by end of next week. You open a blank Google Doc and stare at it. You’re not sure if you’re supposed to write a celebration, a confession, or something in between. Here’s what I tell people in that moment: a post-mortem is none of those things. It’s a diagnostic tool. And most studios run it wrong, which is why the same mistakes show up project after project.

Why Most Post-Mortems Fail Before They Start

The typical studio post-mortem looks like this: a two-hour all-hands meeting where people say polite things, a producer writes up “What Went Well / What Went Wrong” in a shared doc, and that doc gets filed somewhere it will never be read again. Participation is shallow because people don’t feel safe being honest. Insights are vague (“communication could have been better”). Nothing changes.

The real problem is treating the post-mortem as a single event instead of a process. By the time you hold that meeting, you’ve already lost most of the useful data. The specifics have faded. People are in a different emotional headspace. The post-mortem has to start during production, not after it.

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The most effective post-mortems I’ve run were built on data collected throughout development. Sprint retrospectives, milestone reviews, incident logs, informal Slack messages flagging recurring pain points. When the project ends, you’re not trying to reconstruct what happened from memory. You have receipts.

Here’s what to put in place from day one:

A living “friction log”: a shared document where anyone on the team can anonymously note blockers, miscommunications, or broken processes in real time. Notion or Confluence work well for this.
Milestone health snapshots: at the end of each milestone, record scope delivered vs. scope planned, team morale (a simple 1-5 rating is enough), and one thing that slowed the team down.
Incident documentation: when something goes visibly wrong (a dependency breaks, a vendor misses a deadline, a design decision causes a week of rework), write it down within 48 hours while the context is fresh.

When the project ends, you have a longitudinal picture instead of everyone’s selective memory.

Running the Post-Mortem Session Itself

What to Actually Measure

You might be wondering what separates a useful post-mortem from an elaborate way to kill an afternoon. The answer is specificity:

Vague Insight	Actionable Insight
“Scope creep was a problem”	“We added 14 unplanned features after alpha; only 3 made the final build”
“Communication broke down”	“Art and engineering had no shared milestone owner from weeks 8-12”
“Crunch was unavoidable”	“We hit crunch because vertical slice was approved 3 weeks late, compressing all downstream schedules”
“Testing felt rushed”	“QA had 6 days for a feature set that needed 3 weeks; flagged at week 10, not acted on”

Specificity is what makes the insight usable for the next project. Vague findings disappear into the void. Specific ones actually change behavior.

Turning the Post-Mortem Into Institutional Memory

Sources

collected throughout development
using Google Forms or Typeform
disappear into the void

This is where almost every studio drops the ball. The document gets written, it’s good, and then it sits. The producer who ran the project leaves six months later and the institutional knowledge walks out with them.

A few things that actually help: keep post-mortem documents in a centralized, searchable location like Confluence or Notion with consistent tagging. Before any new project kicks off, require the production team to review the post-mortems from the two most recent comparable projects. And in your next project’s risk register, explicitly reference post-mortem findings. If you identified that your QA pipeline was undersized last time, that’s a risk you’re now tracking from day one.

For further reading on building sustainable production processes, I’d recommend Jason Schreier’s Blood, Sweat, and Pixels as a grounding read on what shipping actually costs, and Clinton Keith’s Agile Game Development for the operational framework. For project management tooling, Jira and Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) are both used widely in mid-sized studios, and tools like Linear are gaining traction for smaller teams that want less overhead.

Note: This content reflects the author's personal experience and research. Game development outcomes vary widely; always do your own research before making production decisions.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should a post-mortem document actually be?

Long enough to be specific, short enough to be read. In practice, that's usually 1,500 to 3,000 words for a project of 12 months or more. If you're writing a 10,000-word document, you've written a history, not a post-mortem. Nobody reads it and nothing changes.

Should the whole team attend the post-mortem session?

For teams under 15 people, yes. For larger teams, run discipline-specific sessions first (engineering, art, design, production), then hold a cross-functional session with leads that focuses on inter-team friction specifically. You get more honest input in smaller groups, and the cross-team session is more focused because the intra-team issues are already resolved.

Who should facilitate the post-mortem?

Ideally someone with enough distance from the day-to-day decisions to not be defensive. On small teams that often means the producer. On larger projects, consider rotating facilitation to a lead who wasn't the primary decision-maker on the issues being discussed. If your studio has a dedicated production director or project management office, this is a great use of that role.

What do you do when people are too burned out to engage?

Don't force the session immediately post-ship. Give the team one to two weeks. People need to decompress before they can reflect usefully. But don't wait more than three weeks, because after that the specific details start to blur and attendance becomes harder to coordinate as people shift onto new work.

How do you handle sensitive findings, like a specific person or decision-maker who caused significant problems?

The post-mortem document should focus on systems and processes, not individuals. 'The approval chain for art assets required sign-off from four people, which created a 2-week average delay' is something you can fix. 'Person X was a bottleneck' creates defensiveness and doesn't tell you what to change. If a specific personnel issue needs addressing, that's a separate conversation between the right people, not a post-mortem finding. The post-mortem is one of the few moments in a project cycle when the entire team has permission to look honestly at how work actually happened. Most studios waste i

Ryan Cole Senior Contributing Writer

Ryan Cole covers game production and milestone planning at GameDevProducer.

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