Massive Production Teams and Visual Perfection Extend Game Development Cycles While Redefining Junior Hiring Requirements at Major Studios Like Blizzard and CD Projekt RED
The price and schedule for flagship video games only seem to grow within the interactive entertainment industry. There are already projects taking nearly ten years of development to complete which, even today, is far from unusual in fact, it is becoming the norm for massive development studios. Marcin Undak lead software engineer on Diablo IV pointed out what is creating these extreme development cycles; corporate collaboration issues, and the constant strive for visual perfection.
In the opinion of Mr. Undak, the main culprit behind the massive production teams, which have started to become the standard in today's interactive entertainment industry, is the friction caused by their size. These teams have hundreds of people from hundreds of professions, and getting everyone coordinated slows down the entire process, and hyper realism in visual quality means that assets are painstakingly made, and debugged, to an incredible degree, making most large projects take between 7 and 8 years to complete. These factors have also completely redefined the hiring, and training, process for new junior roles within major companies.
With production cycles being extended, entry level programmers and artists find it to be a highly competitive landscape for obtaining a position. Undak noted that top companies, such as Blizzard and CD Projekt RED, place incredibly high expectations on all hires, even for positions labeled as junior. The availability of positions depends solely on the project stage, however, with less experienced hires generally being brought in during pre production stages where there is ample time to train new hires on the fly; once production is in full swing, it becomes all about immediate productivity, meaning they only hire experienced workers.
The expectations placed upon junior specialists are always, as I have always perceived, extremely high. In a junior role, it is already a must for you to show you know how to do the job. Of course, you do not have professional experience, but it is assumed that you have had some sort of projects you have completed, on your own, that would serve as proof of concept, and allow someone to hire you as a junior. The existence of juniors depends on the stage a given project is in: when you have some major project starting out, there are definitely more specialists being hired across all areas, including juniors, because they know they can learn, but, when you have an active game development phase going on, you hire those that you know can get to work immediately; with cycles as lengthy as they are for the projects currently being developed at places such as Blizzard, and CD Projekt RED, a whole number of years could pass before the beginning of another major project and thus a whole number of years before new juniors are sought.
What Mr. Undak spoke about, is a reflection of the general opinion held in global tech companies. We have heard similar stories before from people within Unity and Tencent, who say that rising customer expectations for software quality, coupled with poor communication from a global team structure, are the primary drivers for long production cycles within companies today. This reality of rare entry level positions and long production cycles is, it appears, what developers must now deal with.
Source: gamedeveloper
