Just a terminology difference. In gamedev postmortem tends to mean a retrospective on the development of the game written a maybe a few months to a year after p

Just a terminology difference. In gamedev postmortem tends to mean a retrospective on the development of the game written a maybe a few months to a year after publication. You're probably thinking of the general engineering meaning, where it's usually an analysis of the failure written in order to prevent the same root cause from causing more failures. So in this context it's not a negative term but a neutral one encompassing both what went right and what went wrong. (And seems to me there were a couple of core lessons there, such as needing to consider ease of console ports when choosing development tools, and that data of indie game sales from a couple of years ago is mostly obsolete).