The term 'AAA' has nothing to do with production values or budgets

[vivster]

GoOnKid said:

vivster said:
1) You seem to be mistaken that the meaning AAA has anything to do with the fact if a game is good. Though basically all of them do have a certain level of quality and polish. 2) An unpolished game would never get the distinction of being called AAA. And before people jump on me, having a certain amount of bugs does not mean the game is necessarily unpolished. It's about the overall experience.

3) Also what do you mean, we don't have anything to go on? We always know how many people worked on a game. So it's quite easy to distinguish AAA games, which were made by hundreds of people, from indie games and smaller games which were made by less than 100 people.

1) No I'm not. It's not me, it's the people out there who think that if a game was expensive it must be good.

2) Mass Effect Andromeda says hi, but I guess that's where your disclaimer kicks in. To which I say, a high budget also doesn't determine an overall experience.

3) Employee Numbers are one thing but we don't know the salary. Also, different people earn different amounts. Also, some tasks may be outsourced and we don't know how much that costs. Also, we don't know how many resources have been reused as leftovers from other games. Also, we dn't know how much tech was custom built inside the studio and how much was bought in externally. Also, we don't know how long a game has been in development.

To all of these issues we only have points of reference but no conrete facts.

The AAA classification is no exact science. It's a classification made by consumers that was adopted by companies as a a marketing tool. It is not hard to distinguish AAA games from indie games. It might be harder to distinguish when all you do is play AAA games or games made by big companies because they are all on a similar level of scope and polish.

BTW Andromeda is more polished than 99.99% of games. It is a true AAA game without any ambiguity.

The only person I've seen in here saying anything about "good" games is you. It's flawed to have a subjective label connected to an objective measure like the AAA label which can be fixed on observable facts.