This is for console games only!

I am so sick of seeing people debating on what a AAA game is nowadays. People claim certain titles are AAA but others are not to forward their agendas. It's quite sickening to menot only as a gamer but potenially as a future developer. It's impossible to tell what a game budget is. Going based off of just metacritic score or sales is wrong too. To make it simple so everyone understands. a AAA game is a retail game. I'm not talking games that release digital first than retail later such as minecraft, TWD and others. For the most ;part, Retail games are AAA games. They all have high budgets. We will never now.

Agree?

Disagree?

Why?

The more broken and badly optimized it is, the more AAA it is.

That's actually quite ironic given that one of the worst ports of the year works flawlessly on PS4.

Noo a AAA game means its a great made game with great storytelling,graphics,gameplay!
resogun is a AAA game!
Ryse - the order 1886 IS NOT.

Whether or not a game is AAA is defined solely by it's budget

AAA is the amount of budget a game has regardless if its retail or not, i love Demons Souls and Disgaea but they are not AAA games, HOWEVER they have better quality than a lot of "AAA" games out there and thats what really counts.

But you'll never know the budget. Can you really say a game like Demon Souls is not AAA or a game like Tales of Vesperia is not AAA?

Since many PC games have ditched physical versions entirely by now, do you think these games are not AAA anymore?

On the other side of the spectrum, Minecraft got a physical release, Shovel Knight will get one too, and many Kickstarter games had an option for a physical version. So are they AAA now too? By your definition, they do, but really they don't.

As you can see, your argument is flawed.

AAA is supposed to mean big budget games (and implied to mean high quality, but that doesn't turn out to be true rather often these days) and has nothing to do directly with retail versions. Indirectly though, it does: Only games with a big budget can afford to go full retail. In other words, you are naming the effect as the cause, inverting the causality.

Any person trying to make a clear distinction between what is AAA understood nothing to gaming.

AAA means big budget, which means big marketing since it's the only thing you can know about the budget, so in what way is taht important for us gamers to know if a game had a huge marketing or not ?

This plus some gaming company like Nintendo usually don't reveal their game's budget.