6 ms·

What does "AAA Game" mean anyway? I'm a bit lost on the definition. Wikipedia says: > In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classifica

What does "AAA Game" mean anyway? I'm a bit lost on the definition. Wikipedia says: > In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion. A title considered to be AAA is therefore expected to be a high quality game and to be among the year's bestsellers. By definition, a budget of $75k + 6-10 people wont make an AAA game. > When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago. I'm biased/invested in this area, but I think nowadays tools are really helping strip away the technical challenges of making a game. Increasingly game development is less about technical challenges but more about the creative challenge. Individuals are willing to pour thousands of hours of work into artistic and creative projects, and I am seeing far less resistance and challenges going forwards for these sorts of people to produce AAA quality games, when previously game creation was extremely inaccessible to them. Also, thank you for Crash Bandicoot. Amazing game :) One I loved playing growing up!

vimota 11y ago
It seems like they meant AAA-quality game, with a budget of $75k + 6-10 people
- robotkilla 11y ago
  I think you're correct... saying that you created a AAA title means that you can compete with major game studios... I think. However, in my opinion AAA doesn't apply to scope or budget but quality of experience. Super Meat Boy is one of the best games I've played in years and it doesn't come anywhere near the scope of say GTA 5 (which is also awesome). I don't think anyone calls SMB a triple-a title though... so I'd say wikipedia's definition is correct. So then, I think the real issue here is aiming to make a game that compete with major studios who have budgets of $50m and employ hundreds of specialized team members. These devs claim it was a passion project, but then they throw in the towel on the entire concept of running an indie studio after the negative reviews come in. I understand the bankruptcy move, but if I were the founder's shoes, I would move somewhere cheap, take a side job and keep making games on the side. If I still loved the Wolfie project, I would fix it for free and I would find a way to send my KS backers whatever I owe them. I would read every negative review of my game, try to bucket the feed back (something like: legit, semi-legit, ignore) and then fix the game. I would also print my favorite positive reviews and hang them up around the house for motivation. If I no longer believed in the game, I would build something new but smaller. 13 years is a long time to wash down the drain due to one failure. Currently I'm trying to make indie games along with my gilfriend. She has no formal 3d art training but has been teaching herself via the internet. I learned Unity and have been teaching myself c# / cg and all the other shit that goes with 3d game development (I come from a python / js background). We will most likely fail hard but I don't understand the concept of quitting when you got into something for fun in the first place. edit: it also sounds like these guys tried to build their own engine... or something. If they did, that was a bad idea. If they didn't, I don't understand why they had so many issues with collision detection. Haven't played the game though... its just odd to hear that they had major collision detection issues.
  - maccard 11y ago
    Collision detection is a ball ache even when you use an off the shelf solution. There's still loads of problems and edge cases to handle. There's the bullet through paper problem, where fast moving bodies will skip through thin objects. There's scale issues when dealing with large bodies colliding with small bodies. There's floating point precision if you're too far from the origin, how you handle narrow things tag can get stuck in geometry. Writing a robust character controller is difficult too. Handling jumping and crouching are both full of collision nightmares.
    - robotkilla 11y ago
      I haven't made it this far yet apparently. Good to know what to expect.
      - toliman 11y ago
        Using Unity 4 / 5... Suffice to say, it is entirely powerful and possible to create incredible games. Ori and the blind forest, Hearthstone, and plenty of AA and indie games use unity, lots of kickstarter projects. To the chagrin of gamers, Steam has greenlit several terrible unity based games, that only use free/cheap unity store assets, namely Airplane (?) and DayZ (sic) , which are quite infamously reviewed by Jim sterling on YouTube. Enough to cloud the market for games created by any future indie dev. Advice is plentiful, though you do have a lack of great sources to ask questions. IMO, devs starting with unity are almost drowned in advanced features to get started from concept to prototype. Easy to learn, hard to master, easier to edit store bought prefabs than to DIY. They can become a crutch very quickly. The unity store can be a boon and a roadblock to progress, because it doesn't always help. Starting out, it won't give you the best direction or how to code, but it will take you forward to developing a playable prototype. Sometimes within hours of starting a new project. If you have a team, unity is going to be the source of frequent anguish, but it is still more flexible than it ever was. the biggest hassle will more likely to be assets, and far down the road, dealing with rigid bodies, collision, raycasthit, and the PhysX implementation of mesh and mass collision. For most devs, the initial unity workload will be around 70-80% asset creation to 20% game coding, and about 290% of the budgeted time, debugging. A good idea is to build a prototype, get the mechanics working while the art is being developed. Once the code is in place, debug/playtesting is critical to developing assets that then can be designed, built as mesh, and imported within the prototype in a few seconds. Character controllers are generally easy, more dynamic mechanim is able to avoid some pitfalls of the capsule collision system, and there are ways to add crouch/jump use cases with pathfinding and AI,(which is a good bit of work.) Unity does excel at getting a walking mesh going, using mechanim to blend animation and mesh collision, and 3d art assets designed in Maya or 3dsmax, etc. When I started with unity in 2012, it took forever to even think about how to build a menu system, until NGUI. It's improved drastically since the store was added.
jeremiep 11y ago
Its easy to underestimate the scale of AAA titles today. Even a few millions dollars with a team of twenty isn't nearly enough to cut it. If that wasn't enough, they also go for the top talent and expertise the industry has to offer in order to manage the massive complexity of these projects. Its also easy to underestimate how much a difference it makes to have experienced developers for projects of such scale. This has to be by far the most important factor when determining the success of these projects. This is both good and bad news for indie developers. Bad in the sense they'll never reach that scale and level of graphics without serious investments. Good in the sense the triple-A giants are anything but flexible and indie developers can therefore differentiate themselves through innovative gameplay and storytelling, which is very much lacking in the AAA scene nowadays.
wisty 11y ago
The only way to make a "AAA" game on a low budget now, competing with the massive asset libraries AAA games build up, is to create some kind of easily modded game, where players can build their own assets. Minecraft does this, in a way. Instead of a villiage-sized Barbie / GI Joe playset (with everything perfectly designed), you get a giant bucket of lego bricks. Not that Minecraft / df style games have done much better on Kickstarter.
- eterm 11y ago
  Minecraft is in no way a "AAA" game. Yes, it's a hugely popular game, but it is the archetype of "indie game done good".
  - wisty 11y ago
    Calling the number 5 selling game of 2014 "not AAA" is pretty much semantic. I agree, it's not AAA, in terms of assets, but I'm saying a "box of lego bricks" (or something like that - copying Minecraft won't work now) is the only way to compete with AAA on assets. PCG looks like a holy grail, but I doubt it (unless you can get it good enough to sell to AAA, then why wouldn't you just license the tool?). Minecraft is AAA success. Your big-box retailer probably has Minecraft guide-books for sale. There's nothing that touches it. Papers, Please is an "indie game done good", and it sold maybe 5% of Minecraft.
    - smtddr 11y ago
      Angry birds, and all merchandise around it, also sold really well.... is that an AAA game too? CandyCrush? Farmsville back in the day?
    - BrandonY 11y ago
      "AAA" doesn't mean "very successful." It is a category for the games with the very highest development and advertising budgets. Minecraft was built and released with near-zero budget and is, therefore, not a AAA game.
      - 11y ago
xixixao 11y ago
That's a pretty bad definition of a AAA game. I'd say it's a game that is up to the current standard in video gaming, which is rapidly evolving. This means that the graphics aren't archaic, the game content has appropriate magnitude (the game doesn't feel short, or lacking in items, game levels/areas etc. as applicable for each genre). It's the level of "polish" the game has. Now that implies the team sizes and budgets, but not that the game will be a bestseller. It can be a total flop, although the high cost of producing such game implies that it has significant marketing, which should bring at least some sales.
cousin_it 11y ago
Yeah, the term AAA can be a bit slippery. Thankfully, the year 2015 gave us a game that feels like the proverbial "spherical AAA game in a vacuum": The Order 1886. Seriously, it might not be the best game ever, but it feels like it was made to become the definition of "AAA look" for the next year at least. And yes, making a game of such visual quality with only 10 people is flat out impossible with current technology, and it's hard for me to even imagine the technology that would make it possible.
candu 11y ago
The video game industry makes ~2x as much as the film industry [1], so imagine production on a scale comparable to (or possibly even exceeding) that of big-budget Hollywood movies. [1] https://www.quora.com/Who-makes-more-money-Hollywood-or-the-video-game-industry https://www.quora.com/Who-makes-more-money-Hollywood-or-the-...
- munificent 11y ago
  ...not including DVD sales, cable, streaming, merchandise, etc.
- differentView 11y ago
  Box office revenue is only 25% of revenue from film entertainment.
blakeyrat 11y ago
This is all from the top of my head. Credentials: I play a lot of video games. AAA game (typical example: Skyrim): * Sells for $50-$60 * Has cutting-edge graphics and (generally) runs on the newest generation of hardware * Is available on most/all gaming platforms * (Nowadays) Usually has some celebrity involvement (Skyrim had Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Michael Hogan. Oblivion had Patrick Stewart.) * 20+ hours of gameplay AA game (typical example: Far Cry: Blood Dragon, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger): * Sells for about $25-$40 * Made with last year's AAA engine * Runs on last year's hardware * Typically available on fewer or only one platform * 8 - 20 hours of gameplay Anything below that is either a classic game remastered (for example, the recent Homeworld remaster), or an indie title. Frequently a AAA game (like Diablo III) will have a AA game come out at the same time to compete with it (Torchlight II.) In a lot of cases, like Torchlight II and Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, the AA game is actually a far superior game to the AAA games its competing with. ;) Sometimes the sequel to a AAA game is a AA game, I'd say that's the case with Wolfenstein: The Old Blood. Some games, like Portal and Portal 2, straddle the line. But I'd slot the Portal games as AA.
- jakejake 11y ago
  One thing to add to that list is that an AAA game is also somewhat defined by the amount of marketing and promotion that goes along with it.
- voronoff 11y ago
  AAA games are frequently one platform, generally either PC for UI reasons or locked into a particular console as an exclusive.
  - blakeyrat 11y ago
    Yeah, remove the multi-platform thing. It's frequently the case (Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, etc.) but it's certainly not required to be a AAA title.
  - homulilly 11y ago
    PC-only AAA games are incredibly rare these days. I'd say most AAA games are on as many platforms as possible to have as many sources of revenue as possible to recoup dev (and marketing) costs. The exceptions are games that get a large amount of funding to be single platform by the platform's owner and there's no real "owner" of the PC platform (arguably Microsoft, but their focus is on Xbox) to do that.

vimota 11y ago

It seems like they meant AAA-quality game, with a budget of $75k + 6-10 people

robotkilla 11y ago
I think you're correct... saying that you created a AAA title means that you can compete with major game studios... I think. However, in my opinion AAA doesn't apply to scope or budget but quality of experience. Super Meat Boy is one of the best games I've played in years and it doesn't come anywhere near the scope of say GTA 5 (which is also awesome). I don't think anyone calls SMB a triple-a title though... so I'd say wikipedia's definition is correct. So then, I think the real issue here is aiming to make a game that compete with major studios who have budgets of $50m and employ hundreds of specialized team members. These devs claim it was a passion project, but then they throw in the towel on the entire concept of running an indie studio after the negative reviews come in. I understand the bankruptcy move, but if I were the founder's shoes, I would move somewhere cheap, take a side job and keep making games on the side. If I still loved the Wolfie project, I would fix it for free and I would find a way to send my KS backers whatever I owe them. I would read every negative review of my game, try to bucket the feed back (something like: legit, semi-legit, ignore) and then fix the game. I would also print my favorite positive reviews and hang them up around the house for motivation. If I no longer believed in the game, I would build something new but smaller. 13 years is a long time to wash down the drain due to one failure. Currently I'm trying to make indie games along with my gilfriend. She has no formal 3d art training but has been teaching herself via the internet. I learned Unity and have been teaching myself c# / cg and all the other shit that goes with 3d game development (I come from a python / js background). We will most likely fail hard but I don't understand the concept of quitting when you got into something for fun in the first place. edit: it also sounds like these guys tried to build their own engine... or something. If they did, that was a bad idea. If they didn't, I don't understand why they had so many issues with collision detection. Haven't played the game though... its just odd to hear that they had major collision detection issues.
- maccard 11y ago
  Collision detection is a ball ache even when you use an off the shelf solution. There's still loads of problems and edge cases to handle. There's the bullet through paper problem, where fast moving bodies will skip through thin objects. There's scale issues when dealing with large bodies colliding with small bodies. There's floating point precision if you're too far from the origin, how you handle narrow things tag can get stuck in geometry. Writing a robust character controller is difficult too. Handling jumping and crouching are both full of collision nightmares.
  - robotkilla 11y ago
    I haven't made it this far yet apparently. Good to know what to expect.
    - toliman 11y ago
      Using Unity 4 / 5... Suffice to say, it is entirely powerful and possible to create incredible games. Ori and the blind forest, Hearthstone, and plenty of AA and indie games use unity, lots of kickstarter projects. To the chagrin of gamers, Steam has greenlit several terrible unity based games, that only use free/cheap unity store assets, namely Airplane (?) and DayZ (sic) , which are quite infamously reviewed by Jim sterling on YouTube. Enough to cloud the market for games created by any future indie dev. Advice is plentiful, though you do have a lack of great sources to ask questions. IMO, devs starting with unity are almost drowned in advanced features to get started from concept to prototype. Easy to learn, hard to master, easier to edit store bought prefabs than to DIY. They can become a crutch very quickly. The unity store can be a boon and a roadblock to progress, because it doesn't always help. Starting out, it won't give you the best direction or how to code, but it will take you forward to developing a playable prototype. Sometimes within hours of starting a new project. If you have a team, unity is going to be the source of frequent anguish, but it is still more flexible than it ever was. the biggest hassle will more likely to be assets, and far down the road, dealing with rigid bodies, collision, raycasthit, and the PhysX implementation of mesh and mass collision. For most devs, the initial unity workload will be around 70-80% asset creation to 20% game coding, and about 290% of the budgeted time, debugging. A good idea is to build a prototype, get the mechanics working while the art is being developed. Once the code is in place, debug/playtesting is critical to developing assets that then can be designed, built as mesh, and imported within the prototype in a few seconds. Character controllers are generally easy, more dynamic mechanim is able to avoid some pitfalls of the capsule collision system, and there are ways to add crouch/jump use cases with pathfinding and AI,(which is a good bit of work.) Unity does excel at getting a walking mesh going, using mechanim to blend animation and mesh collision, and 3d art assets designed in Maya or 3dsmax, etc. When I started with unity in 2012, it took forever to even think about how to build a menu system, until NGUI. It's improved drastically since the store was added.

jeremiep 11y ago

Its easy to underestimate the scale of AAA titles today. Even a few millions dollars with a team of twenty isn't nearly enough to cut it. If that wasn't enough, they also go for the top talent and expertise the industry has to offer in order to manage the massive complexity of these projects. Its also easy to underestimate how much a difference it makes to have experienced developers for projects of such scale. This has to be by far the most important factor when determining the success of these projects. This is both good and bad news for indie developers. Bad in the sense they'll never reach that scale and level of graphics without serious investments. Good in the sense the triple-A giants are anything but flexible and indie developers can therefore differentiate themselves through innovative gameplay and storytelling, which is very much lacking in the AAA scene nowadays.

wisty 11y ago

The only way to make a "AAA" game on a low budget now, competing with the massive asset libraries AAA games build up, is to create some kind of easily modded game, where players can build their own assets. Minecraft does this, in a way. Instead of a villiage-sized Barbie / GI Joe playset (with everything perfectly designed), you get a giant bucket of lego bricks. Not that Minecraft / df style games have done much better on Kickstarter.

eterm 11y ago
Minecraft is in no way a "AAA" game. Yes, it's a hugely popular game, but it is the archetype of "indie game done good".
- wisty 11y ago
  Calling the number 5 selling game of 2014 "not AAA" is pretty much semantic. I agree, it's not AAA, in terms of assets, but I'm saying a "box of lego bricks" (or something like that - copying Minecraft won't work now) is the only way to compete with AAA on assets. PCG looks like a holy grail, but I doubt it (unless you can get it good enough to sell to AAA, then why wouldn't you just license the tool?). Minecraft is AAA success. Your big-box retailer probably has Minecraft guide-books for sale. There's nothing that touches it. Papers, Please is an "indie game done good", and it sold maybe 5% of Minecraft.
  - smtddr 11y ago
    Angry birds, and all merchandise around it, also sold really well.... is that an AAA game too? CandyCrush? Farmsville back in the day?
  - BrandonY 11y ago
    "AAA" doesn't mean "very successful." It is a category for the games with the very highest development and advertising budgets. Minecraft was built and released with near-zero budget and is, therefore, not a AAA game.
    - 11y ago

xixixao 11y ago

That's a pretty bad definition of a AAA game. I'd say it's a game that is up to the current standard in video gaming, which is rapidly evolving. This means that the graphics aren't archaic, the game content has appropriate magnitude (the game doesn't feel short, or lacking in items, game levels/areas etc. as applicable for each genre). It's the level of "polish" the game has. Now that implies the team sizes and budgets, but not that the game will be a bestseller. It can be a total flop, although the high cost of producing such game implies that it has significant marketing, which should bring at least some sales.

cousin_it 11y ago

Yeah, the term AAA can be a bit slippery. Thankfully, the year 2015 gave us a game that feels like the proverbial "spherical AAA game in a vacuum": The Order 1886. Seriously, it might not be the best game ever, but it feels like it was made to become the definition of "AAA look" for the next year at least. And yes, making a game of such visual quality with only 10 people is flat out impossible with current technology, and it's hard for me to even imagine the technology that would make it possible.

candu 11y ago

The video game industry makes ~2x as much as the film industry [1], so imagine production on a scale comparable to (or possibly even exceeding) that of big-budget Hollywood movies. [1] https://www.quora.com/Who-makes-more-money-Hollywood-or-the-video-game-industry https://www.quora.com/Who-makes-more-money-Hollywood-or-the-...

munificent 11y ago
...not including DVD sales, cable, streaming, merchandise, etc.
differentView 11y ago
Box office revenue is only 25% of revenue from film entertainment.

blakeyrat 11y ago

This is all from the top of my head. Credentials: I play a lot of video games. AAA game (typical example: Skyrim): * Sells for $50-$60 * Has cutting-edge graphics and (generally) runs on the newest generation of hardware * Is available on most/all gaming platforms * (Nowadays) Usually has some celebrity involvement (Skyrim had Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Michael Hogan. Oblivion had Patrick Stewart.) * 20+ hours of gameplay AA game (typical example: Far Cry: Blood Dragon, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger): * Sells for about $25-$40 * Made with last year's AAA engine * Runs on last year's hardware * Typically available on fewer or only one platform * 8 - 20 hours of gameplay Anything below that is either a classic game remastered (for example, the recent Homeworld remaster), or an indie title. Frequently a AAA game (like Diablo III) will have a AA game come out at the same time to compete with it (Torchlight II.) In a lot of cases, like Torchlight II and Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, the AA game is actually a far superior game to the AAA games its competing with. ;) Sometimes the sequel to a AAA game is a AA game, I'd say that's the case with Wolfenstein: The Old Blood. Some games, like Portal and Portal 2, straddle the line. But I'd slot the Portal games as AA.

jakejake 11y ago
One thing to add to that list is that an AAA game is also somewhat defined by the amount of marketing and promotion that goes along with it.
voronoff 11y ago
AAA games are frequently one platform, generally either PC for UI reasons or locked into a particular console as an exclusive.
- blakeyrat 11y ago
  Yeah, remove the multi-platform thing. It's frequently the case (Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, etc.) but it's certainly not required to be a AAA title.
- homulilly 11y ago
  PC-only AAA games are incredibly rare these days. I'd say most AAA games are on as many platforms as possible to have as many sources of revenue as possible to recoup dev (and marketing) costs. The exceptions are games that get a large amount of funding to be single platform by the platform's owner and there's no real "owner" of the PC platform (arguably Microsoft, but their focus is on Xbox) to do that.