"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
Diablo 4 lead engineer Marcin Undak has stated that the development of AAA games is taking longer, which is impacting the availability of junior positions in the industry. He noted that companies prefer to hire juniors at the start of projects, but with longer production cycles, these roles are becoming scarce. Undak emphasized the importance of having a mix of experience levels on teams to foster creativity and innovation.
- ▪AAA games are now taking seven or eight years to develop, according to Marcin Undak.
- ▪The increase in development time is attributed to factors such as the demand for photorealism and communication challenges within large teams.
- ▪There are fewer junior roles available at major companies like Blizzard and CD Projekt due to the longer production cycles.
Rock Paper Shotgun publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under gaming. We currently carry 54 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Rock Paper Shotgun |
| Canonical URL | https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/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 |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 07:59:28 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T08:05:00.822Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T08:05:00.822Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | SUveraEdfC7h |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Home News Diablo IV "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 best teams have all seniority levels", notes Blizzard and Ubisoft old-timer Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Blizzard <img alt="Edwin Evans-Thirlwell avatar" src="https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/edwin-portrait.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp" style="aspect-ratio: 1" width="767" height="720" > News by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell News Editor Published on May 20, 2026 Follow Diablo IV 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…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Rock Paper Shotgun.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Rock Paper Shotgun
