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.

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.

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.

I'd argue that The Sims 1 was an AAA game (in that it became the best selling PC game of all time) BECAUSE it ran on last year's hardware, used software rendering, and didn't require a 3D graphics accelerator, so a lot more people were able to play it (like little brothers and sisters who inherited their older sibling's computer when they got upgraded).

Sims 1 wasn't a great achievement in graphics, it was a great achievement in design and gameplay.

Very true. The simple graphics also made it possible for many players to create their own content with less complicated tools like Photoshop + Transmogrifier instead of advanced tools like Maya, which also contributed to its success.

Minecraft was also a great achievement in terms of game design and gameplay, yet had simple graphics, and consequently was easily moddable, which greatly contributed to its popularity and success. But is was considered "AAA" when it was released, and is it considered "AAA" now that Microsoft bought it (even though it's essentially the same game)?

So how important do you think fancy graphics are to the definition of an "AAA" title, versus accessibility (in terms of how many people can play it because of its lower hardware requirements, and how many people can mod it because of its graphical simplicity)? And how important are game design, gameplay, popularity, making money and other issues like moddability to the definition of an "AAA" title?

Another way for a game to achieve easy (but more limited) moddability without limiting its graphical complexity is to support advanced built-in tools for user created content (like Spore for example, which has advanced built-in specialized tools as opposed to supporting simple generic third party tools).

Subsequent versions of The Sims had much fancier graphics, and much more advanced built-in content creation tools (like create-a-sim), but that made it harder to create content outside of the game (because objects were 3D meshes instead of 2.5D sprites, and texture maps for character meshes were not nearly as simple).

The original Sims 1 team (which I worked on) only had four core programmers, but it was developed over many years before the point that EA bought Maxis and put more people on shipping it. So The Sims 2, 3 and 4 were much more typically AAA-ish, and had vastly larger teams working on them. (The Sims Studio became one of four major sub-divisions of EA.)

I think small indie teams would be better off focusing on game design and gameplay instead of fancy graphics.

AAA games are frequently one platform, generally either PC for UI reasons or locked into a particular console as an exclusive.

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.

Are there any PC Only "AAA" titles anymore? I'd think stuff like the Witcher 3 and XCOM 2 are more in the AA range. It is such a murky definition.

The Witcher 3 is also available in last gen consoles, and although XCOM 2 has not been announced for consoles (it's still in development), the first XCOM was released even for iOS and Android.

Current-gen consoles (PS4 an Xbox One).

Oops, yeah, that's what I wanted to say. Brain-fart there.

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.

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.

I haven't played a game in 10+ years. Kind of miss it. If you had to pick one console game I should play what would it be?

Pick up The Orange Box (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box). It includes Half Life 2, (plus the two sequel episodes), and Portal. Portal is a fantastic game, with a surprising amount of story given the fact that it appears at first to be a fairly simple puzzle game. Half Life 2, is a great first person shooter, again with great story.

What I like about these games is that they're immersive, without being overly long or tedious. You can play through Portal in a few evenings, without feeling like you're missing out on hundreds of side quests. The gameplay is tight, fun and innovative.

The Orange Box is a fantastic collection of games. I can also recommend Portal 2.

However, if you have a friend who likes first person shooters, you could play through one or more of the Gears of War games in cooperative split-screen mode. I hate, HATE, HATE playing FPSs on consoles, but I had a blast playing Gears in coop. It was the first console FPS I'd ever played where

* the gunplay felt good

and

* I didn't find myself longing for a keyboard and mouse after two minutes of play.

Indeed, the combat works really, really well with a controller.

I don't know how the game has held up over the years, but it was lots of fun back in the day.

Gears of War is not a first-person shooter, though.

Bah, you're right. I lump FPSs and TPSs into the same bin in my head, even though they're a bit different, and that it appears that the latter is much less nausea inducing.

If you like, change FPS to "shooter" everywhere it appeared in that comment.

The Last of Us. Best game I've ever played.

It felt like I was playing Half Life 2 while watching a zombie movie. I guess it's hard to make a recommendation without knowing what this dude likes in games.

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

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.

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.

I haven't made it this far yet apparently. Good to know what to expect.

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.

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-...

...not including DVD sales, cable, streaming, merchandise, etc.

Box office revenue is only 25% of revenue from film entertainment.

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.

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.

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".

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.

"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.

If I just said "it's semantic", and then I'm saying "I meant AAA success on a low budget", why do you feel the need to debate the meaning of words?

For what it's worth, "semantic" means "related to definition of words". The argument we're having is still semantic. And semantic arguments are usually pointless. Just in case you didn't know.

Angry birds, and all merchandise around it, also sold really well.... is that an AAA game too? CandyCrush? Farmsville back in the day?