Dayi Lin, Ph.D.

Software Engineering for Games

The gaming industry has evolved into a multi-billion dollar ecosystem where developers face unprecedented challenges in meeting player expectations while managing development costs and timelines. Through my research journey, I’ve explored how empirical software engineering methods can help game developers navigate these challenges. This blog post summarizes my key contributions, organized along fundamental software engineering research areas.

1. Mining Software Repositories

Understanding Digital Distribution Platforms

My research leverages digital distribution platforms as rich data sources for understanding game development practices. In our comprehensive study of the Steam platform (Lin et al., 2019, EMSE), we analyzed 6,224 games to understand game review characteristics and their implications for developers.

Key findings:

  • Game reviews contain richer information than mobile app reviews
  • Sale events are more strongly associated with review increases than updates
  • Players invest a median of 13.5 hours before posting reviews
  • Negative reviews are posted more quickly (median 6.6 hours) than positive ones (15.5 hours)

This work attracted significant media attention, being featured in Kotaku, PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Gamasutra, demonstrating the practical relevance of academic research to the gaming community.

Leveraging Gameplay Videos

With millions of gameplay videos uploaded daily, we developed approaches to automatically identify videos that showcase bugs (Lin et al., 2019, EMSE). Our findings reveal:

  • Developers receive a median of 16 minutes of gameplay videos daily per game
  • Some games receive up to 13 hours of videos daily
  • Machine learning can effectively identify bug videos from metadata
  • This untapped resource could revolutionize game testing

2. Software Evolution and Maintenance

Release Management Strategies

Early Access Model

Our empirical study of 1,182 Early Access Games on Steam (Lin et al., 2018, EMSE) revealed:

  • 48% of games use the Early Access model
  • Games like Minecraft raised over $33 million during beta
  • Early Access games receive more frequent updates during the early phase
  • However, some games abandon Early Access unexpectedly, disappointing players

Update Strategies

In studying urgent updates of popular games (Lin et al., 2017, EMSE), we found:

  • 80% of Steam games release urgent updates
  • Games using frequent update strategies have higher proportions of 0-day updates
  • Urgent updates often address:
    • Rule loopholes (23%)
    • Gameplay balance (25%)
    • Critical bugs and crashes

Managing Release Delays

In collaboration with colleagues, we studied 23,485 games on Steam (Grewal et al., 2022, IEEE T-G) and found:

  • 48% of games delayed their initial release
  • Median delay is 14 days
  • Games specifying date ranges (e.g., “Q1 2025”) are more likely to release within that range
  • Delayed games receive slightly lower ratings, though the difference is negligible

3. Software Quality and Testing

Community-Driven Quality Assurance

Modding Communities

Our analysis of 1,114 popular and 1,114 unpopular Minecraft mods (Lee et al., 2020, EMSE) revealed success factors:

  • Popular mods have high-quality descriptions
  • They actively promote community contribution
  • Official modding support significantly improves mod quality

In a broader study of 9,521 mods across 20 games on Nexus Mods (Lee et al., 2020, EMSE):

  • Modding communities significantly extend game lifespans
  • Games with official modding tools have more successful mod ecosystems
  • Mod users submit bug reports, though often in unstructured formats

Sentiment Analysis Challenges

Our research on sentiment analysis of game reviews (Viggiato et al., 2021, IEEE T-G) found:

  • Traditional sentiment analysis tools perform poorly on game reviews
  • Best classifier (NLTK) achieved only 0.70 AUC
  • Game-specific language requires specialized approaches
  • Training on genre-specific reviews improves performance

4. Requirements Engineering and User Feedback

Understanding Player Expectations

Our comprehensive analysis of Steam reviews revealed that players prioritize:

  1. Game design quality over technical bugs
  2. Content value and pricing fairness
  3. Developer responsiveness and community engagement
  4. Regular updates and new content

Platform-Specific Requirements

Virtual Reality Gaming

Our study of 750 popular VR games and 17,635 user reviews (Epp et al., 2021, IEEE T-G) showed:

  • VR games market is maturing with higher-quality releases
  • Cybersickness complaints are rare and declining
  • Players now focus on content quality over platform-specific issues
  • Developers can prioritize gameplay over technical VR challenges

5. Software Engineering Process

Development Process Insights

Through our research, we identified key process improvements:

  1. Data-Driven Development: Leverage platform analytics to understand player behavior
  2. Iterative Release Planning: Use Early Access strategically for feedback
  3. Community Integration: Treat modders as extended development team members
  4. Automated Quality Assurance: Utilize gameplay videos for bug detection
  5. Domain-Specific Tooling: Develop specialized tools for game development

Key Contributions and Impact

My research has made several significant contributions to software engineering for games:

  1. Empirical Understanding: Provided data-driven insights into game development practices
  2. Tool Development: Created approaches for mining gameplay videos and analyzing reviews
  3. Process Improvement: Identified strategies for better release management and community engagement
  4. Industry Impact: Research featured in major gaming media and influenced developer practices

Looking Forward

The gaming industry continues to evolve rapidly, presenting new challenges for software engineering research. Key areas for future work include:

  • AI-assisted game development and testing
  • Cross-platform development challenges
  • Live service game maintenance
  • Player behavior prediction and personalization
  • Automated content generation and balancing

The empirical methods and data-driven approaches developed through game research have broad applications across software engineering. As games become increasingly complex and player expectations continue to rise, rigorous software engineering approaches become even more critical for success.

References

Epp, R., Lin, D., & Bezemer, C. P. (2021). An Empirical Study of Trends of Popular Virtual Reality Games and Their Complaints. IEEE Transactions on Games, 14(1), 114-125.

Grewal, B., Lin, D., Doucet, L., & Bezemer, C. P. (2022). An Empirical Study of Delayed Games on Steam. IEEE Transactions on Games, 15(2), 198-207.

Lee, D., Lin, D., Bezemer, C. P., & Hassan, A. E. (2020). Building the perfect game – an empirical study of game modifications. Empirical Software Engineering, 25(4), 2485-2518.

Lee, D., Rajbahadur, G. K., Lin, D., Sayagh, M., Bezemer, C. P., & Hassan, A. E. (2020). An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of Popular Minecraft Mods. Empirical Software Engineering, 25(5), 3396-3429.

Lin, D., Bezemer, C. P., & Hassan, A. E. (2017). Studying the urgent updates of popular games on the Steam platform. Empirical Software Engineering, 22(4), 2095-2126.

Lin, D., Bezemer, C. P., & Hassan, A. E. (2018). An empirical study of early access games on the Steam platform. Empirical Software Engineering, 23(2), 771-799.

Lin, D., Bezemer, C. P., & Hassan, A. E. (2019). Identifying gameplay videos that exhibit bugs in computer games. Empirical Software Engineering, 24(5), 3165-3189.

Lin, D., Bezemer, C. P., Zou, Y., & Hassan, A. E. (2019). An empirical study of game reviews on the Steam platform. Empirical Software Engineering, 24(1), 170-207.

Viggiato, M., Lin, D., Hindle, A., & Bezemer, C. P. (2021). What Causes Wrong Sentiment Classifications of Game Reviews? IEEE Transactions on Games, 14(3), 377-389.