| Megaoverlord12 said: I preface this by saying I know it doesn't matter, and that I know we shouldn't necessarily be categorizing games as such; but we do anyway, so I'm just curious as to how. What makes a game AAA? We see the phrase thrown around a lot, from critics and journalists to normal consumers, but what does it actually mean? Is it budget? Is it development team? Is it development length? Is it based on the publisher? Developer? Can an indie game be AAA? Can a game become AAA, either during development or after? Are there series that are automatically AAA? And if true, are spin-offs of those series automatically AAA? Does sales performance mean anything? Expectations of sales? Price? Is it marketing? Does consumer prereception or hype mean anything? Does critical reception count? Does a game have to hit a retail store to be AAA? I hear games ranging from your yearly Call of Duty to Destiny to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided be called AAA, yet there is a large gap in... a LOT of ways between the three games. My personal thought on what entails AAA is a game with 2 of the following 5 criteria: 1. A high budget (As much as I'd love to define what I mean by that, publishers and developers almost never reveal their budget for any given game, so I have no idea what a high budget for a game is. I'd guess, $40 million+?) 2. High marketing spend (again, don't know a number for this) 3. A large dev team 4. Have expectations of over a million sales 5. High prerelease anticipation or hype from fans Those are all fairly nebulous qualifiers, right? That's why I'm kinda interested in coming to a definition of sorts. I'm collecting the thoughts of many, from emailing game critics and journalists and asking in forums. |
All of that is actually wrong but ... it's replaced the real definition among consumers so it has, in effect, become the current definition.
I used to own a video and game rental store. I did all the purchasing. Back before "AAA" really entered the general vernacular, grades such as AA or AAA were designated by the retail industry in order to rank investment potental.
That's it.
I got pre-release catalogs from my distributers every week with games ranked by grade. If a game was projected to sell very well then it got the AAA rank. I remember Nintendo DS games that we uppercrust forum-goers would never call "AAA" being designated exactly that. On the other hand, a big budget game that was expected to sell poorly might get an AA designation.
The system itself comes straight from the investment industry, as some here probably already know.
"AAA is the highest possible rating assigned to an issuer's bonds by credit rating agencies. An AAA-rated bond has an exceptional degree of creditworthiness, because the issue can easily meet its financial commitments." http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/aaa.asp
