I've never worked in any software development settings.  However, Stardock's CEO has posted a number of times about how his company goes about 'doing' their game development.  It includes discussions on these boards.  It might be a bit tedious, but if you looked through the posts 'Frogboy' (Stardock CEO's public avatar) has on the various stardock forums, you would probably gain some significant insight into SD's processes. Hope this helps.   -e

My guess, based on my knowledge of games and my brief exposure to UX:

Playtesters, QA, etc fill in the role of UX in the games industry, I would think.

That's in terms of UI. As for new products and experiences, this industry is mostly churning out shiner new versions of old game genres (like hollywood) but with a higher polygon count or RAM requirement. It's not that a UX mindset wouldn't help create better types of games - it would - it's that innovation might be less valued than ever in mainstream videogaming.

Indy games would love UX designers, but most of them barely have budgets for developers, so UX kind of is not a thing in videogaming.

Interesting, It surprises me that UX hasn't changed the game development industry much yet. With the epic fails of games the past few years. A user centric approach would match up very well with the way games are starting to involve players in on the development early. I was looking at the RTS build flows posted not long ago and it reminds me very much of the work I do day to day. Getting user feedback is great but a UX person could interpret the user feedback and data and help provided clarity to feedback noise I am sure they get.