AAA – Developers discuss the three little letters: "It's a stupid term. It's meaningless"

Revolution Studios co-founder Charles Cecil remembers first hearing the term, "A number of publishers basically said, 'For every dollar we spend on internal development, we're going to account for a profit of three or four or five dollars,' or whatever. Virgin in particular had a lot of internal development, and they were posting huge profits, and that was fine, as long as you never ship the product – and by god, you never can it, because then you take an almighty write-off."

[anast]

AAA is advertised as that the product is the highest quality and the top of the companies creative form. The term hasn't changed, the talent and quality of the work has. If the AAA label meant inferior quality to the general public then the term would have changed to fit the actual products being released. We can say a lot of things are meaningless to us, but it doesn't make it so.

[ED-E]

It was always a loose term for budget scale, whoever tricked you into thinking it referred to quality was wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

[anast]

No one is being tricked on my end. It is implied through adverts. When a product is being advertised and people see AAA they think big budget equals high quality and to say otherwise is disingenuous. They wouldn't advertise the product just to simply tell everyone how much money they spent, it's absurd. If AAA only meant budget then it would be a waste of time to use the term as an advert hook. I wouldn't use a Wikipedia if you are trying to teach people lessons about not being a sucker.

[thorstein]

He didn't read the article. They talk about the terms origin and how it didn't refer to games until the 90s.

[anast]

@thor

I read the article. It's all people's relationship with a word. I don't discount their relationship. I made a statement about how the word has meaning in the general public.

I'm not arguing etymology here. That is obscure. I am talking about how the word has meaning to the general public. To think it only a definition without an implication is short.

[thorstein]

Anast,

You don't know more nor better than people who have been in the industry since the 1980s.

[CrimsonWing69]

I don’t think it’s meaningless, to be honest. I think it’s a fine way to classify games with a specific budget and talent behind it… not saying they’re all great or anything, but there’s a distinction between indie, AA, and AAA games. Not all games are made equally.

[Gaming4Life1981]

I agree with what your saying about games with a specific budget and talent level define the meaning of AAA. The term AAA does not mean what it used to and should not be taken as such.

[SoloZelot90]

Modern triple A games aren't actually triple A. Triple A means high quality. They for some reason placed high budget as one of the things that define triple A and that is just not the case.

Hades for example is an example of a high quality game...triple A. Starfield on the other hand is like a AA low quality title.

[CrimsonWing69]

That’s extremely incorrect. AAA has always referred to high budget and big-scaled developed/produced games. Hades is NOT AAA, that’s an indie game.

Again, AAA is the budget and size of the people working on it. And Starfield is AAA…

[anast]

People think big budget means high quality. To say otherwise is disingenuous and being obscure. In your own reply you used the term "talent". If talented people are working on something, what are the expectations of the public product?

[CrimsonWing69]

@anast

High budget doesn’t inherently mean the “qulaity” I think @Solo is meaning, but that’s not the point of the AAA label. AAA is an industry term that describes the scale of investment and team size, not quality.

Hades is a great title, but remains an indie title because of its smaller budget and team. Starfield, despite its divisive reception, is undeniably AAA due to its production scale. Talent doesn’t guarantee perfection, but it defines ambition—and AAA reflects the ambition of resources, not just results.

I don’t know what your definition of “quality” is, but a AAA game does have significantly higher quality visuals and production values than a AA or indie venture, regardless of your feelings on the game experience, itself.

But I don’t think the word “quality” is being used in the right sense here. I think @Solo is referring to his enjoyment of a game vs the shift in corporate decisions most AAA games have gone in. While there’s argument to be had that Hades is a “quality” experience, it’s still not a AAA game in terms of production costs and amount of developers on the project, no matter how you try to argue it is.

I should’ve used a better word than “talent” in my previous post. I was really meaning the amount of devs on the project. Indie and AA games have amazing talent working on them, just not the budget or amount of devs that a AAA venture has. That’s really the defining factor between the two. For example, imagine the same amount of staff and budget working on a Hades game that worked on Spider-Man 2. It would be a higher “quality” game, maybe not necessarily a higher “quality experience” of a game, but the visuals and production in the game would more than likely be “higher quality.”

Hope that makes better sense.

[anast]

But your instinct went straight for the word "talent", your reply is filled with quality. Quality in a product is taken wholistically by the consumer. To think otherwise is incorrect and vastly minimizes the strength of implication which is a synonym for meaning, when it comes to advertising.

[CrimsonWing69]

@anast

Ok, let me make this clearer then: Indie games are not AAA no matter the “quality” they have.

[Goodguy01]

Simply just means it's a heavily funded game and developed by a hundred plus developers. Doesn't mean it'll be a great game as we've seen many times.

[thorstein]

It's interesting to see that AAA was an investment term before it became what it is today. I remember even the early days, no one referred to Super Mario Bros. as AAA or Donkey Kong on Colecovision as AAA.

It was a stupid term.

[Gaming4Life1981]

Yea AAA is a meaningless term but it used to mean something. I prefer Good Games and Bad Games myself.

[anast]

I agree.

[Alos88]

AAA means a title with a big budget and often a large team, along with a heavier marketing cycle. The sort of game you see adverts for. It absolutely has meaning.

[Roarke]

I was always thinking that its about quality, but its only about budget now :(

[anast]

You are still correct. It implies quality. People are trying to move the goalpost to sound smart.

[thorstein]

"Move the goalposts" refers to changing the criteria needed to make an argument.

AAA didn't refer to gaming until the 1990s. The people who have worked in the industry before that time are taking about the origin of AAA.

Just because you had an erroneous understanding of the term doesn't mean the term meant something different back then. These people know what they're talking about.

Maybe you should have read what they said.

[anast]

It is implied. Is it not? The relationship between implication and meaning are very clear in the context of the general public.

They can have their own relationship with the word, but to deny that to the general public, the ones that pay their salaries, think the same way they do is absurd.

[Hofstaderman]

Well UbiSoft pegged Skull and Bones as AAAA.....

[blacktiger]

That's the same way of saying Indie movies and High budget movies, and not a lot of ppl like indie movies to be honest.

Terrifier 2 vs Terrifer 3
Now you see the difference

[isarai]

So soil the phrase by touting it around but continuing to make garbage, then say it has no meaning and it's stupid? Sounds like a poor attempt to distance yourself from the mess you created. AAA simply means grade A talent, Grade A budget and Grade A production value, a way to say it cant fail to investors. Problem these days is you're replacing talent with politics and investor control, which makes it all fall apart

[HyperMoused]

Wasnt a problem in the past, so this translates too, with current practices we cant make a AAA game, so what does that even mean anymore, and you could tell when Ubi coined AAAA....for crap.