put on your tinfoil hats!

I believe the term AAA is marketing nonsense used to cow hardcore gamers into buying big industry games. If you think too hard about it, you might be brainwashing yourself.

I thougt it would be more interesting to know how the term originated. I found one answer online from someone who claimed to work at EA.  He said in the mid 90s they had a meeting where the presenter claimed nbig budget, AAA games were thenonly hits, backed up with data from the previous year that showed the low budget, "B" games all failed badly.  It seems like a plausible answer, how it got out into the minds of gamers, the thread failed to answer, but maybe it was more organic than I suggested above, e.g. maybe devs started using it in interviews with media.  I feel like I started seeing it used often after Wii and DS launched, but that may be confirmation bias since I am a Nintendo bot.  

 Sorry no link, I'm on my ancient Samsung tablet, the origin thread is on gamedev.stackexchange -131731

I would consider all physically released full-priced games a AAA or at least AA-game. But frankly it’s just a marketing-term

Real Corinthian Leather.

Interesting. I've never heard anything on the origin of the term.

Of course they do. They spend a lot of money on their games. Since triple A simply stands for big budget game. Also why do you assume most people do not consider Nintendo games triple A games. I still have to meet the first person who thinks BoTW is not a Triple A game.

So to answer your question they all make triple A games, but not every game they produce is a Triple A game.

AAA isn't related to the developer or having ties to the platform holder.

So if a game have a big budget and high production value it's AAA be it made from an independent dev, a major publisher or a platform holder team.

None of the Nintendo games are AAA.both in terms of quality and production value.some of PlayStation and Xbox games can be considered as AAA.

That didn't take long..

Was Detroit really not a AAA game? I played through it recently and would have guessed it to be one of the most expensive games of the gen to make. It has a large cast of characters, some well-known actors, and I'm assuming it's been in the making since that old Kara demonstration back in 2013 or so.

Either way, it's a bit strange to me that we categorize games using a method that isn't well understood. What value does a game have being "AAA" for those that don't know what "AAA" means?

People saying this is market stunt but I don't even remember many devs talking about how much money they put in the game...

And from what I know Detroit may have been in development since before PS4 released, probably after they released B2S... so yes 4-5 years easily, and over 30M cost.

First pokemon had equivalent to AAA budget, but that was used solely on marketing (50M) because the game itself was in the low millions cost.