It doesn't seem to imply that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_documentation

I mean, it literally means "after death" and stems from the name for the study of dead bodies, so it seems odd to name any post-facto report a post-mortem and the Wiki article may apply to gaming industry but it's not really common industry usage.

Normally in tech, a post-mortem is a particular kind of analysis, backtracking from an incident to figure out what caused it, with the aim of preventing it happening again and improving quality overall (aka "incident report").

There have also been a number of "startup postmortems" recently, which means just as it sounds.

Not if you consider it a post-mortem of the development. When the project is done, development is dead (cue: pedantic comment on product life cycle). So it's not technically a post-mortem of the game, but a post mortem of the development process of the game. The post-mortem's at Games Developer/Gamasutra are typically for commercial games, and often offer a retrospective of launch and relative popularity as well.

Someone can die, but not have been a failure in life. I've always taken post-mortem blogs to mean "We're not working on this anymore. Here's what we learned during the time we did." The reason for a project ending is often failure, but it doesn't have to be. I've seen several post-mortems about successful projects, they're just not nearly as common as the failures.

>> "Someone can die, but not have been a failure in life."

I think it's referencing the fact their body has 'failed' i.e. died. Not that they were a failure in life. A post mortem is usually carried out to figure out why the person died i.e. what part(s) of their body failed.

Perhaps "debriefing" would work?

Merriam Webster provides a second definition: "following the event".

Post-mortem is widely used to refer to analysis of a completed project, failed or otherwise.

Especially with games, gameasutra runs postmortems with devs frequently to talk about both successes and failures in their projects.

I like how anna anthropy suggested using the phrase "post-partum" instead of post-mortem, as a game only really becomes a living thing once it's been released to the public.

http://auntiepixelante.com/?p=1991

In the game industry it just means analysis after launching a game.

Generally no