Is it about popularity? The publisher of the game? Or maybe the quality?
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!
Isn’t the A terminology from credit rating? Or does that have the same origin?
No idea if that specifically is related.
But a lot of fields have convention of ranking A,B,C,D etc with A being better just because it’s the top/first.
Credit was the one with AAA, AA and B which is already “trash”
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”.
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.)
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.
Budget
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.
I don’t get why you say well not entirety, then proceed to say something that has nothing to do with the bar being set anywhere.
Games come out good or bad, but if it’s a triple A it is expected to have a quality soundtrack, good voice acting etc, like a movie. Indies is forgiveable if they got simple stuff replacing those.
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.
the budget
$$$
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.
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.
