Metal Gear Solid 5 Phantom Pain, The Last of Us, GTA 5 and Persona 5 are AAA Games. high budgets & retail.

only download games... no.

It's mainly project budget, also if it's technically advanced and has depth. So plenty of retail games are not triple A. E.G. Sniper elite 3.

Vast majority of AAA titles releasing now are found only on PC,PS4, X1. Very few on Handheld or Wii U.

AAA games are games with high budgets, with tons of money in it for the productions.

A game being retail has nothing to do with if it's AAA or not.

At first i thought that AAA games refered to the score, like great scored games. But then i realized that the majority of community refered as AAA games when they had big budget, which makes sense.

There are games like GTA5 that would easily fill that category, but at the same time there are games like Splatoon that people consider AAA but from the looks of it, it just seems like a low budget game for me. At the end of the day, without actual proof of the budget of the game, we should be more careful when categorizing games.

Also, maybe for another another thread, but what's an indie game? If it's literally financially and creatively independent, you can count The Witcher 3 as an indie game, but not things like Flower and Journey.
Are crowdfunded games indie?

a AAA game is a game that costs $60 at the initial release.

AAA is the combined budget of marketing and development budget. Triple A suggests that it has a big marketing push and development time is longer with a ton of people working on it, which should translate into quality. but really nowadays, quality in releasing a game due to deadline and the internet to help on day 1 updates, the quality diminishes.

Hence you'll see several AAA games have season pass, day 1 DLC, etc.. this is to have an ROI for that game since a $60 would take a longer time to get that money. and pushing DLCs and season pass should help get the money back as soon as possible.

regardless if there are glitches or day 1 issues, gamers still buy the game and pre-order so it won't bomb that much and developer would still do this cycle and won't push for quality.

so going back AAA is really leaning towards marketing budget plus dev budget regardless if the quality is great or not.

This!

http://www.vg247.com/2009/02/04/uncharted-2-has-budget-of-20-million-says-wells/

Gears of war 1 was 10M

These are development budgets though, don't include marketing. Still, no way DS cost 10M to make.

I disagree. AAA games is an archaic definition from the 90's to describe high budget games from major publishers. Retail games are just games sold at a retailer, that too will be a thing of the past in the near future.