| Slimebeast said: Well it depends on how you define AAA of course. Pesrsonally I agree that AAA should only be the real big games. But I think it's assumed in the industry, at least at the beginning of current gen, that an AAA game is a typical high production game that takes a 100 member team 2 years to develop.And that means $20 million budget and up. Nowaydays those $20 mill games are dime a dozen so perhaps we should call them just AA games, while the truly big guys are AAA (BF, Halo, COD, Grand Turismo, GTA, Assassin's Creed, Metal Gear Solid etc). |
No, AAA rank is just a projection of how well a game is expected to sell. Things like production and marketing budget can certainly factor into the analysis but that certainly isn't the whole of it. Retailers don't care how much a game cost to make, they care about what kind of profit it will generate. It's a system designed to tell them what to invest in. When I used to order for my store, looking for AAA beside the name of a game was a fantastic way to separate it from the clutter--and there was a LOT of clutter, especially for the Wii.
People put too much emphasis on AAA status. It's basically just an educated guess about how well a title will perform. A game can cost 5 million but they'll give it AAA rank if the experts believe it will make a lot of money for retailers.
It never was intended to be a way for fans to rank games.
