Is it about popularity? The publisher of the game? Or maybe the quality?
My personal answer is that - big production budget.
If a game cracks over at least 10 million to develop, yeah it’s AAA level. But the average seems to be around 40 ~ 80 million range. Some games are in triple digit millions. So yeah I see it as a budget thing.
AAA movies were called that by haveing A-class actors A-class musicans and A-class production company. this correlates to nothing in Videogames. Its mostly a marketing term. I agree with most that initial budget plays the biggest role.
it’s a measurement of how much money was spent on development, it means absolutely nothing about the actual game and is very misleading.
It does mean something about the game. It losely sets the bar of expectations of quality.
Well, not entirely. There’s still plenty of AAA games that are generally considered great (Witcher 3, Gta 5, RDR 2, Cyberpunk, Last of us, etc.) but there are also many more that are “playing it safe” or straight up bad. Sequels like Call of Duty or Assassins Creed are almost impossible to tell apart, gameplay of too many AAA brings nothing new, and so on.
And then there’s AAAA Skull and Bones which was just absurd piece of shit.
the budget
Bought Diablo 4 at %50 off because I wanted to see what a AAAA game was like.
End result? No clue – going to guess budget.
It is just a buzz word in the industry and doesn’t have a tight definition. It’s basically any big budget full priced game from a big or medium sized publisher. They’re just communicating that they’ve made a big budget game with an expectations of hopefully big sales and profit.
It does imply the game should be popular and high quality, but those are not a given. Plenty of AAA games end up being trash and flopping yet they’re still AAA games.
It’s similar to the Blockbuster concept in the film industry.
Exactly this, it’s a within-industry term that has leaked out to members of the public. It simply means “we put a lot of money into this, and we expect to make a lot back (for our investors)”
As for where the ‘A’ terminology came from then that itself is likely a reuse of other entertainment industry terms.
In the old days when you released a record album, you’d put the best tracks on the ‘A’ side and the less popular ones on the ‘B’ side.
Similarly, we talk about ‘A-list’ celebrities abs ‘B-list’ celebrities, and use the term ‘B-movies.’ to denote low budget.
And so what happens wben something gets “bigger and better than A?” Well, you just add more A’s!
Similarly “super food” means anything the marking team wants it to mean. Normally, I read that as “this food may be slightly healthier than eating candy, so we would really like you to give us your money, deceive yourself into thinking you’re doing something right, and feel good about it”.
Any food that gets labeled as a “superfood” quickly falls prey to over farming, causing the nutrition quality of the food to plummet because the food is being grown too rapidly to absorb the nutrition from the environment the way that it did before it was aggressively over farmed by profit seeking corporations, causing it to quickly cease being any kind of a superfood.
well, technically not ‘food’, but water is pretty much a superfood in that drinking sufficient amounts will improve virtually every aspect of people’s lives. (unless you happen to live somewhere with Republicanium Pipes™️)
But yeah. It always cracked me up when people point to berries (those Acai stuff, for example) saying “super food” because they’re “high in good stuff”. Like. Every other damn berry.) (and those greenhouse strawberries we get in winter? Much lower carbon emissions.)
Budget
It’s definitely not quality or popularity given how many have been flops recently. It’s about the budget and publisher. Big money and/or big names = AAA.
$$$
The Budget
A is short for Aaaaagh. The number of As represents the amount of crunch and exploitation that goes into making a game.
High cost, high potential, high advertising budget, low creativity and lower likelihood of being interesting or meeting the expectations they fostered among the buying public.
Ideally, it has to be a big publisher that spends a ton of money on it.
In truth, an AAA game can be spotted by a price tag of over 60 €/USD, at least one season pass, 3+ different editions, a huge day-1 patch and a lack of anything that’s not predatory monetization of any remaining gameplay elements.
As a general guideline, that check list looks about right. It seems to me that the company doesn’t strictly need to have all of those features in the game. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 put all of their dev points into having the most catastrophic launch possible, and they had none left for predatory monetization. Others have chosen a more balanced approach. Some game breaking bugs, a little bit of whale milking etc.
It’s really sad that AAA games suck as hard as they do, considering their budget, compared to indie games.
I mean, really. Indie games are awesome.
Kind of a survival bias going on here. There are tons of indie games coming out that suck way more than most AAA games, the Hades and Tunic of this world are a very small minority.
eh. I wouldn’t say that. Sure there’s some awful games. But by proportion, there’s only a few AAA titles each year, and the vast majority of them are at best meh. The plot is trite, the mechanics pro forma.
The real creativity is in the indie world. if you consider it by dollars, indie games tend to win out. (lets exclude all the cheap mobile games that… basically are there to sucker you into micro transactions…)
18k games released on Steam this year. How many were AAA? How many have you heard about? Yes there’s creativity in the indie world, there’s a lot of very creative shit as well.
Indie games don’t have shareholders demanding extra-short term profits to please, they can afford to innovate. An AAA game needs to pay the shareholders as fast as possible, and how to do it? Well, the way they do it now; take your cod, or fifa, or whatever AAA ip you want and you’ll see how the patterns repeat in all of them.
AAA games are the fast food of videogaming.
yep. that’s certainly part of it. But also look at Starfield. 25 years in the making and… I regretted that buy so hard. There were lots of just stupid oversights (Like shipbuilding ladders/hatches being random. Could they not create a mid-module part that creates the hatches? like equipment plates?)
“you can be what you wan’t, but we’re going to nag you about it nonstop.”
I hardly ever consider looking at AAA games. All my time is spent on indie games.
It’s the same with movies, music, books…the big corporations try to make a safe, mediocre, standard experience that will have the broadest appeal without taking risks. To find really good stuff, you need to look to creators who really care about the art (which is a lot more work and has higher risk of being boring, but higher potential for reward too).
It’s determined by the publisher’s PR department.
