What Are AAA Titles?
May 26th, 2006 by JuusoPosted in Ask Game Producer, Game Development
Question:
What are AAA titles?
Short answer:
High-quality games with high budget.
Longer answer:
There is a debate that takes into considering several aspects that AAA titles should have. Some of the most common qualities that AAA titles should have (according to some experts) are:
- High-quality
- Broad market
- High sales
- Large teams
- Big budget
- Polished audio-visual direction
- Perfect technical and artistic execution
- Playable & fully enjoyable within the first five minutes of play
- Exhaustively tested
- Bug free
- Great usability
- Continous, balanced entertainment from beginning to end
- Great graphical user interface
- First place in the markets, and great marketing
- Hype
Some of the qualities are more arguable than others (like playability in 5 minutes). Some argue whether AAA titles should have certain budget or certain amount of sales.
In general, AAA refers to a game of the highest quality.
May 26th, 2006 at 11:54 am
lol sometimes my “testes” are pretty exhausted too :-)
May 26th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Ive worked on 2 ‘triple A’ titles. Both sold dissapointingly badly. The term is pure nonsense, its thrown around by amrketing dweebs in an attempt to use it to put down cheaper games. A triple A game certainly does not mean quality. It means they spent a lot of money on it, and had a big team, but the game can still be boring buggy and unplaybaly rubbish.
You never hear about “single A” or “double A” games. Its like the term ‘blockbuster’ which people use to describe a film because they cant get away with calling it “fun” or “good”. The implication is that it must be a good game because we spent lots on it.
GRRRRRRRR
May 27th, 2006 at 7:52 am
@cliff: maybe I should have added “should refer to a game of the highest quality” ;)
May 31st, 2006 at 5:27 am
yeah, AAA just means it cost a lot to make.
Many ‘AAA’ games are horibbly buggy at launch, others fail to sell, others get canceled before they have a chance to sell…
December 28th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
So this means simply that even if you make Oblivion as ‘indie’ game, it will not be rated as AAA product?
I think myself that AAA game is game that can compete with other AAA games in the same genre.
December 29th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
There are many definitions for “AAA” games and some people think only “highest quality” should be considered AAA while some think that big budget or really fancy graphics will automatically mean “AAA” game. There really isn’t one final answer that would please everybody, but hopefully this article shed some light into this issue.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:10 am
[...] platforms, InstantAction promises to support complete versions of just about any full-scale, or AAA, game a publisher wants to make available online. Brett Sayler, vice president of technology for [...]
July 8th, 2009 at 4:55 am
“AAA” games = games with high budget.
Never heard someone (user or reviewer/journalist) using “AAA” to designate a very high quality game with low/middle budget. Never.
They say it “can compete with AAA games [like CoD]“, never say “an AAA games”.
“AAA” = big fat budget.
You can still waste money in incompetent managers, pointless project with stupid deadline and over-marketing, and have a shitty game.
(or like DarkAngel said, “get canceled before they have a chance to sell” :D)
October 24th, 2009 at 1:14 am
[...] Property) and to companies with which they may do business. The SIG leaders fear that AAA companies want to infiltrate and somehow control the SIG and by God they are going to bar the gates [...]
October 24th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
[...] thread at indiegamer got me pondering what are AAA titles. I wrote a somewhat detailed blog post 3 years ago and thought that it’s time to update the [...]