I think AAA is all about the scale of productions, not the quality.

1 hour ago, mr_tawan said:

I think AAA is all about the scale of productions

But scale of products firstly depens from developers level and robustness of tools that thay used.

Example: studio called for example "Big Shark"  has created game with 10x10 km location of city areа with some ,  50 types of unique characters skins, 50  types of low-poly quality occlusion textured weapon (for example up no 5k poligons on best LOD),usin a usual tools and engines,  spent for it thouthans of human years and tens of megadollars of budged and called it for example "Final and complete fail". Other company called for example "Tiny Harpoon" has created a same genre game with 100x100 km of generated location, that have more realistic look, virtually unlimited for cost of parameteric  generation unique character skins, 100 of unique high geometry detailed weapons with 10 mods of each with best LOD level started from 50k+ for cost of using more robust modelling tools that produces other kind of primitives that allow a smooth LOD generation at render time, together with colliders and phisical model parameters and kinematic logic, more sophisticated AI,  more robust and realistic rendering and phisic simulation engines, but has spend for creation of its next-gen algo couple man-years , couple hundreds of computer generator hours of time and tens of kilodollars of budget and called it a "Just a fun try". Wich of those games can pretend to be called AAA? Looks like a "Tiny Harpoon" has make a 1000x  scale world by spending 0.001 of resources for cost of proper brainware and hardware usage in comparsion with "Big Shark".

Really any computer related field is kind of automation. So more scalable work able to do developers that able to shift to computer  most of work that other do manually, instead of developers that uses huge budget for manual works strategy.

12 minutes ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

Wich of those games can pretend to be called AAA?

You don't seem to be getting it.

It doesn't matter which game is of better quality. That isn't what AAA means.

39 minutes ago, jbadams said:

That isn't what AAA means.

Im just trying to understed from wich same scale it depends - from scale of results produced or from scale of resources and budgets wasted?

• Who the studio/publisher are:
  • Have they made successful games in the past?
    • This is where "quality" comes into play. Your current game will be called AAA if people expect quality based on your past releases.
  • Is it tied in to another AAA franchise ?
    • Is this based on a blockbuster movie/tv show?
•  How much development budget went into developing it:
•  How much budget went into marketing it:
  • Even a AAA studio will not market a terrible game with a multi million $$$ budget if it knows in advance the game will not sell. Thus in my opinion that game should not be considered AAA
• Solid and established business practices:
  • What kind of deals can the publisher negotiate with retailers?
    • I garantee you that and indie dev will have a hard time publishing at Gamestop from the very beginning.
      • if they do, they will pay a much bigger commission to the store. (because they don't have a back office capable of negotiating stuff)
  • What kind of tech support does the publisher try to give?
    • Even if the tech support ends up being bad: Was there an appropriate budget sunk into it?

Some indie games are great, revolutionary, and make alot money, but they succeed despite not having enterprise level infrastructure behind them.

Terrible indie games are a travesty. I wouldn't play them for free.

Some AAA games are trash, but are still considered AAA because of the AAA name/organisation behind them. A good sign of a bad AAA game is a game that lost money despite selling in millions of $$$. Usually this is attributed to: The game is bad, the marketing blitz and retailer negotiated deals still get it to sell better than any indie, but it had a AAA budget sunk into it so it is still a failure.

Terrible AAA games are usually still playable. (just not worth 20$)

Early on in game-dev, AAA meant:

A-Grade innovation 

A-Grade critical reception 

A-Grade commercial success 

Now, the standard meaning within the games industry for AAA means:

A-Grade production budget. 

That's it. AAA games are expensive games. 

9 minutes ago, Hodgman said:

Early on in game-dev, AAA meant:

A-Grade innovation

Okey understed. Here we steal mean A-Grade innovations, may be just becouse most of developers here, especialy indi, also involved or has been involved in past into hi-tech or scientidic software development.  But on owerseas meaning has shifted to budget size.

11 hours ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

Okey understed. Here we steal mean A-Grade innovations, may be just becouse most of developers here, especialy indi, also involved or has been involved in past into hi-tech or scientidic software development.  But on owerseas meaning has shifted to budget size.

I guess it more like 'over time' than 'oversea'.