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[Ryuu96]

shikamaru317 said:

Ryuu96 said:

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.

Yup Yup...Forgot about Mistwalker which backs my point up a little more.

That is exactly my point though, it's rare and it's unique but it isn't impossible, Lighthouse could very well set themselves up like The Initiative and The Initiative's Perfect Dark is AAA. I don't think this is what Lighthouse Games is doing but I'm just saying, just because they're only 30 employees right now, doesn't mean they aren't AAA...When they say they're AAA, they just mean the game they're working on is AAA.

They've only just set themselves up, they could very well grow to over 100. We've no idea how much they plan on outsourcing either. But desires right now are to be AAA. I don't see why they should be doubted when investors are throwing dozens of millions lately, the Co-Founder of Playground is going to receive a lot of investment on top of the millions that Microsoft gave him for Playground Games, Lol.

I don't really think we are in a position to say to a studio claiming to be AAA "no, you're wrong" when we have no idea at all about their plans, investment, financials, etc.

I know that isn't what you're doing though.

Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 27 March 2023