I KINDA knew what AAA meant, but not really. Now I do! Thanks for posting this.

I still don't know what it means because the term is massively overloaded. Does it mean:

* a game with a huge development and production budget

* a good game

* a challenging game

* a game intended to be played competitively online

* a game that features adult themes like sex and violence

My guess is that it actually means the first, but game industry marketroids speak as if all these criteria were coterminous with one another.

It means only the first. I've never seen it used to mean the other ones.

The term AAA implies a sort of rating of quality, which is why it seems duplicitous to me.

It's a bit like the term "blockbuster" in film. Originally it meant a movie so good, lines to see it would go around the block. These days what it actually means is a huge-budget film filled with CG and spectacle, and studios labor under the belief that throwing that much money at a production will lead to blockbuster-scale ticket sales. Then they wonder why their "blockbusters" flop catastrophically at the actual box office.

It only implies a rating of quality because a large budget tends to imply high quality.

To give an example, no one calls Pillars of Eternity a AAA game despite it being raved over by gamers. The reason is simple. It didn't have an overly large budget, it had just a single artist.

People expect high quality to come from a big budget and that's completely reasonable (not duplicitous in any way). But the term still means a large budget. No one with much familiarity with the industry would argue otherwise.

I think the misunderstanding comes about from those who don't pay too much attention to the gaming industry as a whole misunderstanding the meaning because they guess at it via context and get it wrong. There is absolutely an implication of quality, but it is not a part of the definition of the term.

AAA means a certain budget, which should at least correlate* with high production value. Not necessarily "good," but "expensive looking."

*This might not be true in cases of outright corruption or incompetence.

You're spot on about the term blockbuster. Same problem there. "Blockbuster" now means high budget and mass market.

And exactly that point is the reason why I hate triple A games.

They are produced like movies. Throw insane amounts of money at an idea. More money, more insane things are possible.

But games don't actually _need_ lots of things, so much complexity or licenses for soccer teams/car brands. For me AAA games make no sense, and their economy makes even less sense.

I think there's a distinction to be made between complexity/expense of production and complexity/depth of gameplay. AAA games seem to be maximizing the former and minimizing the latter. The average single-player AAA experience is a two-to-ten-hour long series of cutscenes and linear gameplay areas, with the multiplayer more than likely some reskin of Counter-Strike. Or look at iterations of the same/similar games - Firaxis' AAA Civilization: Beyond Earth felt shallow and lifeless next to their inaugural almost-indie Alpha Centauri, despite BE's fully voice-acted and 3D-animated leaders and AC's mere static portraits.

Or for the ultimate in non-AAA gaming, Dwarf Fortress. Looks like Nethack, plays like AutoCAD, devours time like nothing else.

I don't think most recent AAA games count as "challenging", the tendency has been going in the other direction for a while, minus accidents like Dark Soul. I'd say it's mostly about the budget, and as Hollywood demonstrates regularly, it's extremely easy to create a flashy but ultimately mediocre product with a huge budget.

Not to say that all AAA games are like that, of course (eg, Alien Isolation looked pretty decent).

It always means the first. Some people may use it in a way that also implies the second. The rest are entirely unrelated.