ZombiU Was "Not Even Close" to Profitable, No Plans for a Sequel

[Slimebeast]

pokoko said:

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.

Really? The definition is based on sales expectations rather than development cost?

I totally never have thought of it that way in all these years even though I have thought about the business side of game development quite a lot.

Interesting.