Not sure what definition you are using to exclude Pokemon, but Wikipedia's [0] definition certainly would classify it as AAA [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_publisher#Major_pub...

I think AAA is more about budget.

I thought the budget for AAA games was higher, and I thought the budget for Pokemon (handheld games) would be lower.

But turns out Pokemon Sword and Shield cost >$20M to make, and AAA is low 10s of millions. Definitely AAA by every measure.

I don't think many would say that $20M would be AAA today, games are much bigger and more expensive today than 20 years ago. $20M budget means you would break even on less than a million sales, I doubt anyone would call that level of budget AAA.

Pokémon does however have an AAA level marketing budget even if it doesn't have AAA level development budget.

AAA is more of an investment term, how much money and how reliably is this project expected to return? Pokémon very reliably produces a ton of sales and revenue, so is AAA even if their development budget/quality doesn't look AAA at all. Normally you need a high budget to ship games that will reliably sell, but Pokémon managed to get there via branding instead.

What, there's a AAAA category now?

The good thing about arbitrary labels is you can apply any one you want :)