Bright-Light said:

What budget though ?
At what point is a budget a AAA budget?

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patapuf said:

They would be for that company (it's a relative term, "AAA" means something different for a 10 man company than it would for say, EA).

As an outsider (f.e. a retailer) you have a bit of a different perspective. If the heavy hitters/blockbusters from Activision, EA, Ubi etc. cost 50 million on average or have x amounts of marketing budget, that's AAA, because those game own the vast majority of the market share.

For consumers AAA is pretty meaningless.

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Mengy said:

All of this talk about AAA games and such, but the term "AAA game" is subjective in itself. Does it mean a fun game with great gameplay? Does it mean a graphically modern looking game? Or does it mean a game with a huge budget, large dev team, and immense marketing campaign? To some a game like Minecraft may be a AAA game by one definition, while to others games like The Witcher 3 or Far Cry 4 would be AAA games by a different definition. I've seen a poster in one thread call Dark Souls a AAA game when the very next poster said it was only an indie game. Is that truly something worth arguing about?

All of this is just labeling games with the intent of separating them into categories, but why? Why segregate games at all? In the end all that truly matters to us is whether or not the game is fun and worth our money, and that is irregardless of how many people made it or how much money it cost to make or how many commercials are out in the wild for it. This whole AAA vs. indie games trend is just bad for the industry, it's divisive and misleading and not really adding anything of value to our hobby. We need to change it somehow, make it less polarizing and more effective.



What we need is a new classification system of games, a new way to quickly describe games that doesn't make one game immediately seem lesser than another simply based on how much money is behind it. Because to us that honestly shouldn't make any difference, what matters is the end product that we may (or may not) be purchasing. Or maybe just simply drop the AAA label altogether, as the lines defining the difference are blurry at best. Maybe using Metacritic user scores would be better? Call one game a 9.5'er and another one a 5.3'er to convey user ratings for games?


Because if a game like Banished which was made by one person can have a MC rating of 8.2 while Simcity 5 by EA / Maxis gets an MC rating of 2.2, then which game is truly deserving of the AAA title?

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inm8num2 said:

The classification system might be okay - we just need more companies and games to fill in the spaces between AAA and low-budget/indie and balance the playing field a bit.

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