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.
Re:Post mortem of my one game a month
by squeaky-clean on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @07:24AM
(#8756801)
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?
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.