Is it about popularity? The publisher of the game? Or maybe the quality?
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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.
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.
the budget
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.”
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.
The Budget
Because AAA is the sound you make when you realise that your favourite game franchise has been rendered creatively irrelevant by boardroom executives who hold no stock in the company they’re being paid fuck-you money to ruin, the game itself will cost as much as a day of cocaine and multiple concurrent sex workers, you’ll be squeezed for subscriptions and rereleases for the next decade at best before the next uninspired trend-chasing sequel, and it won’t even work on launch.
Alternatively, it’s the sound you make when you contemplate that your favourite game hasn’t even come out yet because it’s being made by a legendary but somehow underfunded indie developer whose uncompromising creative integrity rivals the 1994 lineup of Gwar as they snubbed a distribution deal with Warner Bros. just to keep the song “Baby Dick Fuck” on the album, and the game has already created an online community of toxic fans who hate it before it even launches, and you realise that the only way you’ll ever have satisfaction is by becoming a game developer yourself.
If it makes hipsters angry, it’s AAA.
In the video game industry, AAA (Triple-A) is a buzzword used to classify video games produced or distributed by a mid-sized or major publisher, which typically have higher development and marketing budgets than other tiers of games.
[…]
The term “AAA” began to be used in the late 1990s by game retailers attempting to gauge interest in upcoming titles, and first appeared in print in a press release from Infogrames in June 2000. The term was likely borrowed from the credit industry’s bond ratings, where “AAA” bonds represent the safest investment opportunity and are the most likely to meet their financial goals.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industryDLC
Since then it has become shorthand for large budget games produced for major publishers and the problems that come with that:
- “safe” game design and themes that a major business might require before they invest 100s of million dollars on the project. This will often means that they follow industry wide trends (e.g. zombies, or open world game with crafting)
- overpriced for the base games, special editions, and often season pass and DLCs. again its the business trying to make good a profit on their investment
- if the design allows it be padded with copy-paste content to increase game time in an effort to justify the high price. (see: Ubisoft syndrome).
These days? A broken bug simulator, zero content without 500 dollars worth of unbalanced DLC’s, pay to win loot boxes, in game ads, subscriptions, but super fancy looking promo videos promising something epic so you better invest 80 dollars pre-purchase so they have your money with you not being able to play the game for months after countless postponed release dates with in the end still a broken piece of shit product because why put in more effort, they already have your money anyway.
