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[shikamaru317]

Ryuu96 said:

shikamaru317 said:

Yeah, I agree that size is a definite factor for a AAA game. I don't think I have ever seen a game that I would personally define as AAA that came from a developer with less than 100 devs, at least not in the last 7 or 8 years (Skyrim's dev team was under 100 devs but that was in development from 2008-2011, Bethesda increased to about 140 core devs for Fallout 4 plus an additional 50~ devs at support studios, and now Starfield's team is over 250 core devs just at Bethesda Game Studios itself). For instance Ninja Theory called the first Hellblade AAA, but it wasn't really, they made it with just 20 devs and it was only 6 or 7 hours long as a result, there is a reason it released for $29.99 instead of the typical AAA and large scale AA price of $59.99 at that time. They seem to be going properly AAA with Hellblade 2, with both a longer dev cycle and rumors they have 100+ devs on Hellblade 2 now.

In fact I'd say budget is less of a hard rule than team size is. While some AAA's these days have budgets in excess of $100m, we have seen recent AAA games with smaller budgets, sometimes much smaller than $100m. While it has been 8 years now, Witcher 3's budget was $81m at the time which is $93m with inflation and that was a 150+ hour RPG in a 100+ square mile open world, I'm sure there were smaller AAA games this past gen with lower budgets than that. It was reported that Resident Evil 2 Remake's budget was under $100m back in 2019. And then there was Control, definitely AAA in graphics quality, length (30ish hours of content), and dev team size, yet Remedy reported a budget of just 30m Euros or $35m USD for it.

Size is often related but not a hard rule, that is my point, theoretically an AAA title could be made by a studio less than 100 employees because all AAA refers to is budget of a title but often sizes are larger than that because AAA is a lot of work. I don't think it's likely that this new studio stays at 30 FWIW...30 is their size upon creation, that's already quite large for a brand new studio.

There are a lot of studios with only 100-200 employees working on AAA titles. By the logic that size matters, Perfect Dark isn't an AAA title because The Initiative is only ~50 employees but that brings me onto my second point, that the size of the lead studio is an extremely poor method of determining a games total size nowadays with the sheer scale of outsourcing that goes on.

Sea of Thieves was made by a 100-200 Rare team, Hellblade 2 is being made by a 100-200 Ninja Theory team, Gears 4/5 was only in the 200s for The Coalition IIRC. None of these sizes that I'm listing though take into account outsourcing partners. The issue with the varying levels of AAA budgets is there isn't really a set rule on where the threshold is to turn something from AA-AAA, it's really developer decided but it doesn't change that it only means the budget of a title.

And my third point that when a studio calls themselves "AAA" all they mean is that they're working on an AAA IP...

Well, The Initiative is a bit of a unique case, much like Mistwalker was when they made Lost Odyssey. Both are smaller studios made up of mainly lead and senior devs, while most of the grunt work was being outsourced, with Mistwalker the grunt work was outsourced to Feelplus, with The Initiative it is outsourced to Crystal Dynamics (though some of the lead and senior devs on Perfect Dark are at Crystal, it's not all grunt work there). I think with The Initiative you need to take into account both the 50 current internal devs, and the likely team of 100-150 at Crystal Dynamics that is assisting on it.