So if AAA is the best quality grade for games, what would be fair to middlin'?

CCC?

Or nothing at all as anything less than AAA is unworthy of consideration?

That doesn’t necessarily mean high quality–it’s mostly big budget games. A small development team can still do something of high quality that can surpass some AAA games, as long as they design something that they can manage.

This;
It’s about budget scale, not product quality.

That doesn’t make sense. As a small dev, you won’t have 80…250 mil $$$ budget. So you won’t be making an AAA game.

AAA only means big bucks were wasted on the project. And that’s about it.

For example, remember I see/read that per character on skyrim 5 they used a programmer and a animator, count that for all characters… you or friends, or people you are able to join, will need to do all the characters, story, marketing, management, put the computers, software licenses used and so on.

The make it fun, aesthetic, coherent and all higher level decisions in AAA are not on the devs normally, I guess… only if their team/hierachy permits it.

That info is incorrect.

Bethesda has very small development team. About 100 people total. There are 784 unique npcs in skyrim. Witcher team had about 230 people. For comparison, Ubisoft Montreal is said to have 2700 employees.

AAA+ Will buy from again! (eBay joke) When people tell me about AAA developers/publishers I just roll my eyes. I love this new world with UE4 and everyone having access to the tools needed to make a game. Now we’re seeing more innovative games being created. I’d rather watch a movie from an indie director than I would Michael Bay, and I think games are going the same way. Which actually gives more credence to the games as art argument.

To answer the question though, wouldn’t it be AA for the mid tier? If AAA is top, AA is mid then A would be the one man indie team? Forget all that, let Greenlight and your peers judge your work!

There’s some backlash, or quite a lot really, to “AAA”, just look at the saga of Batman: AK on PC. The future is delivering a good game with or without suitable DLC and being responsive to the community. Of course you need to have a good team and suitable funding, two aspects of which I am nowhere close to figuring out. But “AAA” just means “we need to move X million copies in the first X months to make X hundred million/ billions in return because we spent X hundred million making this thing with X thousands of people”.

It is interesting to note that in Asia free-to-play and ESports is massive so that’s an entirely new “BBB” realm, if you will.

Personally, as a PC gamer some “AAA” games for me means a solid single-player storyline I can immerse myself in like Alien:Isolation or AC:Unity. But with AC:Unity you’ll spend the first few 20-50 game hours “fighting” with the game because it is extremely dense in content, and despite the recent patches you’ll spend the first 10 hours tweaking things to get the quality you expect and “The Assassin PC Gamers Deserve”.

Once I “finish” (it would take months to truly get 100% completion) the bits I want to complete for AC:Unity I’m not sure what my next stop is. AC:Unity is about the current limit of time and energy I’m willing to spend on a game to enjoy it. To be fair I don’t mean bugs or glitches, I only recently got it so it’s post Patch-5 which fixed most of the issues. It’s the mental energy figuring out all the immense level of detail and nuances.

Simply because the publishers don’t want to take any risks. It’s all about a new franchise not making as much money.

And that’s why I dislike the triple A world. They make decisions based on their pockets and not based on the quality of the game.

Perhaps because quality of their marketing campaigns is much higher than quality of their product. Look at latest installment of Fallout 4. They didn’t limited themselves to TV and YouTube ads as GTA5, they went full scale hype building using social media. Websites like 9gag, which are primary “funny pictures collection” were flooded with F4 posts.
Big publishers are not selling games anymore, they are selling branded product. They don’t care about innovations or games being fun - it’s irrelevant, sales of the product often start 3-6 month before realize and reaches it peak 1-2 weeks after the lunch. As long as a lot of people are interested in buying product and reviews are hold-up till last moment, they can publish what ever they want.

Every year the amount of new players goes up. On average, just as with movies, players don’t really have a sophisticated understanding of what makes a specific game good or bad anyway, so why bother?

There is something very funny specifically in case of Michael Bay movies. I have impression that he found a sweet spot where all his movies are financed by product placement. The last Transformers had some ridiculous amount of product placement - over 20 different brands were present. Taking into account that perhaps over a hundred million of people watched his movie at least one time, this could have covered a big portion of expenses. It’s not about movie being good, it’s about getting as many people as possible into a cinema in a shortest possible period of time.

It is because of HUGE marketing budgets and advertising campaigns. With enough noise, it is possible to reach enough customers.

IIRC, half of GTA budget was spent on marketing. Same applied to mass effect. Plus those series have fans too.

This is my biggest complaint EVER. I’m not 19 anymore and I can’t spend 10pm-3am at my desk with headphones all isolated in the dark. I like to play on PS4 and in my living room… with my wife. But she can’t play because NOTHING IS SPLIT SCREEN ANYMORE. Which is part of the reason I’m making my game, just to have something competitive and fun you can play on the couch with your loved ones.

AAA game makers suck… I just got SW Battlefront and I dig it, it’s fun, my wife wanted to play but the only split-screen is a ****** local versus mode…

Can you proved a source for that gta argument?

1 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Development cost 50 Marketing Cost 200

2 Grand Theft Auto V
Development cost 137 Marketing Cost 128

3 Final Fantasy VII
Development cost 45 Marketing Cost 100

17 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Development cost 46 Marketing Cost 35

Spending as much or more on marketing as development is common for AAA games.

@ZacD thanks for bothering to look that up and posting a link.

You have search engines, information is literally at your fingertips, you can type query into search engine and verify this kind of info yourself in seconds.

:)… just make games, if you are on a AAA team, great, if you are on a indie company great!!! if you are alone or with friends, great!!! if you are with unknow people great!! but do games!