“Seven or eight years is not that unusual”: Diablo 4 lead says AAA games are taking longer to make, which is bad news for junior applicants

The biggest videogames are taking longer to make, according to Diablo 4 lead engine engineer Marcin Undak, and one consequence is that there are fewer junior openings at industry dreadnoughts like Blizzard and CD Projekt, because companies prefer to hire juniors right at the start of development. This isn’t ideal, Undak suggested, because “the best teams” have a healthy mixture of crabby old wizards and sparky bantlings. OK, he did not call anybody either a wizard or a bantling. Maybe next time.

Undak offered these thoughts during a presentation at this year’s Digital Dragons conference about what working on an “AAA” game is really like. “AAA” is a much-bewangled buzzword, of course. Undak – who worked at Ubisoft, Google and Epic, before joining Microsoft’s military entertainment subcomplex – defined it in broad strokes as “the biggest, the best and the most technologically advanced”.

“It’s usually hundreds of people per team, hundreds of millions of dollars for budgets, games are usually released on all possible platforms, unless they’re exclusives,” he said. “And they take three or more years to make. Recently, even seven or eight years is not that unusual.”

It obviously varies by the production, but that last thought echoes what assorted Tencent, Unity and Hooded Horse execs told Game Developer in September last year. The C-suite herd attributed the lengthening of development cycles to the photorealism arms race, greater pressure to boff bugs, and bad communication within massive teams, among other factors. I’ve spoken to a few industry people myself about increasing production length, but I’ve never really considered the implications for job applicants with less experience.

During a Q&A after the presentation, a younger indie character artist observed that there appear to be fewer junior roles open at companies like CD Projekt, and that companies now have higher expectations even for junior applicants.

“I agree that the bar is really high even for a junior position,” Undak replied. “But as I mentioned in my presentation, I think it was always like that. Even for a junior position, it didn’t mean that you don’t know how to do your job. You still need to have experience. Maybe not working experience, but you know, from your personal projects and things like that.

“To answer the fact that there are less junior positions, I think it depends,” he went on. “It depends on [what stage] the projects currently are. So usually, when big companies start new projects, there are going to be more open roles, for all seniority levels – especially juniors, because they know they’re going to have time for those juniors to learn on the job.

“But if the game is already in full production, and they just need some roles, they usually open just senior positions. And because the cycle of the productions is getting longer and longer, it might take years for a big company like Blizzard or CD Projekt to start a new project, and start opening those roles.”

The younger developer had a follow-up question: in general, is it more valuable to hire somebody with less experience at the start of a project, and build them up over the course of production?

“The best teams have all seniority levels,” said Undak. “Because when you only have seniors and principals, those people are usually there for a long time and they are very good at what they’re doing, but maybe not as excited as junior people that come in. And also junior people bring more fresh ideas. I think recently, Expedition 33 was a great example of what a passionate team of junior people can achieve.”

I’m not entirely sure I’d characterise the Expedition 33 developers as “junior”, in terms of either depth or breadth of CV. To pick a few names from their staff page, Sandfall studio founder Guillaume Broche is a former narrative lead at Ubisoft Shanghai and associate producer for The Division 2 and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. Lead writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen is a former investment banker who briefly worked at NASA. Even conspicuously bright-eyed UI and gameplay programmer Victor Boulez had several years at Splash Damage, Cyanide and Virtro under his belt before joining Sandfall.

Still, I guess this supports the point about high expectations for even starting roles at major companies. Imagine going into a videogame company interview and hearing that the previous applicant worked at NASA. “A likely story,” I’d have scoffed. “Now gimme the gig, gramps! (‘Gig’ is what we precarious young persons call a ‘job’.) Please hire me for the good of my brain – I have all these passionate ideas threatening to pour out of my ears.”

This article was based on a press trip to Digital Dragons, with the event’s organisers paying for travel and accommodation.