Hi Clinton! It is a great honor/ego boost to get your opinion here.
I won’t say Agile isn’t difficult everywhere, but there are simply fewer success cases in games (I can fill a shelf with books or articles about Agile conversion success stories in software). There are also far fewer game studios than the rest of software, but this itself is a retarding factor (less people to discuss with, try ideas, fail, etc.).
I also know for a fact that at least a few of the ‘success stories’ are anything but: empty Agile implementations on projects successful for totally unrelated reasons. We only find that out once the chickens come home to roost, though, and people are far less likely to go to GDC and talk about how they were wrong about everything :)
-Rob

Great, insightful post! Your point that principles are overlooked is correct. “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” applies to agile based processes as well. Too many times, devs try to apply practices by-the-book as a boilerplate, not change anything else, and expect instant success.

However I don’t see non-game agile efforts having more success. Agile is simply “not easy” anywhere. It’s not because the work is hard, it’s because agile is a mindset and mindsets are very hard to change.

Cheers,
Clint

As for “Game development has historically done a poor job of using middleware” – in my experience this happens because game middleware is pretty bad in many, if not all, cases.