It seems the general direction the internet is going and I’m all for it
where does AAA even come from. Is it like michelin stars and the american automobile association started it. If not why don’t I hear about the AA or just A or B or C or D games. They should do like the recording industry and have categories based on amount sold and I would limit sales for full retail price. Once they set the price as what they think of it then they only get credit for those who pay full freight. Just to limit deeply discounting to pump the numbers and maybe to encourage a reasonable starting price.
It comes from the publishers in the 90s. They needed an easy way to tell stores/distributors how popular they thought each of their games would be, to help them decide how many of a certain title the distributor should order. The games expected to be GotY contenders would be marked AAA, AA for otherwise decent games, A for more niche games and B for “this is a starshot, we’re hoping it will sell enough to justify production costs”. That then lead to more and more games being marked as AAA due to budgets getting increased, and the whole system became a bit redundant.
he games expected to be GotY contenders would be marked AAA, AA for otherwise decent games, A for more niche games and B for “this is a starshot, we’re hoping it will sell enough to justify production costs”.
Is there any evidence of this being the case? Personally, I don’t remember anything other than “AAA” back in the day, with other variations coming about much later as budgets grew and people wanted more specific delineations.
My understanding is AAA is literally just a buzzword in the vein of AAAA. It doesn’t relate to budget, team size, publisher/no publisher, kind of same as indie at this point.
It maybe made a little more sense when it was a publisher descriptor? EA, Activision, Ubisoft were publishing games at a different scale than Midway, Acclaim, THQ, etc. But still, as far as I understand is more of a marketing term as opposed to designating anything specific.
My assumption is baseball
AAA is the best you can get in minor leagues before you move to the major leagues
