What Are AAA Titles?
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.
lol sometimes my “testes” are pretty exhausted too :-)
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
@cliff: maybe I should have added “should refer to a game of the highest quality” ;)
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…
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.
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.
[...] 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 [...]
“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)
[...] 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 [...]
[...] 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 [...]
[...] about the move away from big-budget games. “We used to be at a point where everything went triple-A, but now indie scenes and all these kind of games are taking off, and it lets you work [...]
[...] the future of connected games, folks from Facebook game companies as well as some pretty well know AAA companies. The basic idea behind the session was the fact that games are becoming less of a piece [...]
In truth, the term AAA game seems to mean a game not made on game maker. It’s not just a marketing term, it’s a term used for conversation in the industry. There needs to be a difference between someone who has worked on or shipped Zelda, Twilight Princess and the latest flash craze that shows up on addictinggames.com
AAA is that differentiation. It often means high budget simply because that’s what those large projects cost… But the point is not that you have spent a lot of money, but instead that you’ve played with the big boys. This, of course, is very subjective – but it’s a starting point for conversations to begin.