To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles. Modest mid level titles from a studio between tentpole releases that would pay your bills and didn't break the company if they didn't sell well. It also generally related to the price you would be expected to pay. These days a AA/Indie game is $40, and a AAA title is $60/70. The rise of AAAA is a self aggrandizing to try and justify slapping a higher pricetag on products.

A great example would be an excerpt from Activision in 2004. Doom 3 in August would be AAA, then in September a bunch of AA games - cod game "united offensive", X-Men legends, Rome:total war, and Shark Tale. Then in October a AAA title with Tony Hawks underground 2.

History Lesson enclosed

Nowadays it's either AAA or Indie. Around the turn of PS3/x360 games became seen as a product and companies became more focused on individual games moneymaking, so fewer and fewer AA games got made in favor of big blockbusters. Game companies went broke trying to compete in this new market, and because so much rides on individual games that when they fail the company is in danger of going belly up - and so gets bought. This is why you heard about all those acquisitions and power consolidation in the past 20 years of the game industry. Big boys with money to spend buying up the losers tables when they lose their win streak.

About the turn of the 2010s and the changeover from PS4/XOne, the Indie Scene exploded in the vacuum left behind in the wake of those buyouts. Older Millennials who had been in college for programming games graduated and came to market and began publishing through steams Greenlight and even finding publishers not bought yet to make it to market. Games that were either easier to make or play and needed word of mouth. Sometimes you would have a real break out like Minecraft, super meat boy, Celeste, that would catch the attention of big studios and get the offer of a lifetime to sell out and go big.

And that brings us to today. Now because of market stagnation AAA has kind of lost meaning, because so many games are releasing in a poor state. In an effort to set a title above the others, a couple of people have tried to dub a game "AAAA" to try and reinvoke that sense of quality and polish that used to come with AAA. This started in 2020 with a Perfect Dark reboot (The Initiative) from Microsoft. The game has yet to release. It was subsequently laughed at and dismissed as silly corpo nonsense. Then Ubisoft stated Beyond Good and Evil 2 would be AAAA, this went under the radar because the game is vaporware and no one cares. And so this brings us to Skibidi Bonesacks where Yves (the CEO) called it a "truly AAAA game" to try and set it above games like assassin's creed and call of duty. And because it's nothing more than a buzzword to allow a ceo to stand on a stage self-felating, it released as a fucking disaster, like so many AAA games now anyway.

[–] Goronmon@lemmy.world 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles.

To be a bit of a pedant, "AAA" was basically the marketing term to denote a game with a larger budget. The term "AA" came around afterwards as a way to distinguish games that fell between smaller indie games, and larger budget AAA games.

Edit: Corrected spelling.

[–] Tamo240@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

pendant

pedant?

Sorry

[–] Goronmon@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Haha, yup. I knew something looked off.

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