It seems the general direction the internet is going and I’m all for it
You must log in or register to comment.
It means that the key is stuck.
AAAA was a term said by a single out of touch Ubisoft executive for a single game that wasn’t very good. He was ridiculed for it at the time.
So AAAA means nothing. At all. Stop using it.
I think there is some merit to using it in a critical sense, just based on what happened that one time it was used.
To me, AAAA means a game that was given way too much budget for its scope, to its own detriment. Take what should be a niche, mid-budget game and pump it full of cash. The game becomes too big to fail and needs to use every “play it safe” strategy the MBAs demand in order to recoup its budget. So it aims for broad appeal, which makes it fail at being the niche game it was supposed to be, and it ends up flopping.
And AAAA is a reference to that Ubisoft exec. It doesn’t have any other meaning, so now it’s obviously just satire for a shitty game that the publisher is overconfident in and wants to charge too much money for (they were trying to defend the $70 price at the time).
AAAA is those tiny batteries that power electric pens
Awful Alright Alright Alright
To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles. Modest mid level titles from a studio between tentpole releases that would pay your bills and didn’t break the company if they didn’t sell well. It also generally related to the price you would be expected to pay. These days a AA/Indie game is $40, and a AAA title is $60/70. The rise of AAAA is a self aggrandizing to try and justify slapping a higher pricetag on products.
A great example would be an except from Activision in 2004. Doom 3 in August would be AAA, then in September a bunch of AA games - cod game “united offensive”, X-Men legends, Rome:total war, and Shark Tale. Then in October a AAA title with Tony Hawks underground 2.
History Lesson enclosed
Nowadays it’s either AAA or Indie. Around the turn of PS3/x360 games became seen as a product and companies became more focused on individual games moneymaking, so fewer and fewer AA games got made in favor of big blockbusters. Game companies went broke trying to compete in this new market, and because so much rides on individual games that when they fail the company is in danger of going belly up - and so gets bought. This is why you heard about all those acquisitions and power consolidation in the past 20 years of the game industry. Big boys with money to spend buying up the losers tables when they lose their win streak.
About the turn of the 2010s and the changeover from PS4/XOne, the Indie Scene exploded in the vacuum left behind in the wake of those buyouts. Older Millennials who had been in college for programming games graduated and came to market and began publishing through steams Greenlight and even finding publishers not bought yet to make it to market. Games that were either easier to make or play and needed word of mouth. Sometimes you would have a real break out like Minecraft, super meat boy, Celeste, that would catch the attention of big studios and get the offer of a lifetime to sell out and go big.
And that brings us to today. Now because of market stagnation AAA has kind of lost meaning, because so many games are releasing in a poor state. In an effort to set a title above the others, a couple of people have tried to dub a game “AAAA” to try and reinvoke that sense of quality and polish that used to come with AAA. This started in 2020 with a Perfect Dark reboot (The Initiative) from Microsoft. The game has yet to release. It was subsequently laughed at and dismissed as silly corpo nonsense. Then Ubisoft stated Beyond Good and Evil 2 would be AAAA, this went under the radar because the game is vaporware and no one cares. And so this brings us to Skibidi Bonesacks where Yves (the CEO) called it a “truly AAAA game” to try and set it above games like assassin’s creed and call of duty. And because it’s nothing more than a buzzword to allow a ceo to stand on a stage self-felating, it released as a fucking disaster, like so many AAA games now anyway.
Skibidi Bonesacks
As one of those “older millennials” you referenced… What the fucking shit?
The meme is because Skull and bones is so bad of a fumble, to also just fumble its name. I picked it up from some review but I can’t remember who it was. Dunkey? Ah too long ago.
It might have sold better if they actually named it Skibidi Bonesacks.
Scrumptious Billabong
To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles.
To be a bit of a pendant, “AAA” was basically the marketing term to denote a game with a larger budget. The term “AA” came around afterwards as a way to distinguish games that fell between smaller indie games, and larger budget AAA games.
pendant
pedant?
Sorry
Haha, yup. I knew something looked off.
To be a bit of a pendant
To be a bit of a pedant, it’s pedant.
I looked at an “AAA” game maybe twice in give or take the last decade and both times have regretted it. Indie games are the bomb.
The extra A is for abomination.
The extra A comes from the MBAs adding their grain of salt that no one wants.
So the extra A is for ‘Asshole’?
A (A Grade, not B grade)
AA A Advanced
AAA An Advanced Advertisment
AAAA An Advanced Advertising Arsehole.
Wait, we’re doing quadruple As now?
That’s nothing. French porc offal sausages do five of them:
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_amicale_des_amateurs_d'andouillette_authentique
It’s also onomatopoeic, as it’s the sound one makes when first smelling one
Oh I do bloody love a bit of offal tho. I think that AAAAA screaming might be my guts, cos it’s deffo not my gob
Your mileage may vary. It’s not in the hakarl/sürstomming region of bad smells.
But if it sounds like your thing, get the ones from Troyes!
An Ubisoft exec described Skull & Bones as the first AAAA game. Given the generally unfavorable reception this game got, “AAAA game” has become an expression of mockery.
Ubisoft are
I don’t know, but if I ever create a meme game (assuming I ever got the opportunity), I’m definitely gonna market it as a AAAAAAAAAA game that was so good we had to downgrade it to a meme because your face would melt just by looking at the title screen due to how high quality it was.
That must be how they named this.
AAAA games are clearly inferior to AAAAXY games.
We need it for IPv6. Don’t hate
Mhh, DNSv6 (name doesn’t make sense but everyone still knows exactly what is said. Like “pointing toe”.)
I mean, it’s just DNS with an extra field type.
Artificial Abomination Absolutely Avoid
It always did.
It just corresponds to the length of the scream now.
where does AAA even come from. Is it like michelin stars and the american automobile association started it. If not why don’t I hear about the AA or just A or B or C or D games. They should do like the recording industry and have categories based on amount sold and I would limit sales for full retail price. Once they set the price as what they think of it then they only get credit for those who pay full freight. Just to limit deeply discounting to pump the numbers and maybe to encourage a reasonable starting price.
My understanding is AAA is literally just a buzzword in the vein of AAAA. It doesn’t relate to budget, team size, publisher/no publisher, kind of same as indie at this point.
It maybe made a little more sense when it was a publisher descriptor? EA, Activision, Ubisoft were publishing games at a different scale than Midway, Acclaim, THQ, etc. But still, as far as I understand is more of a marketing term as opposed to designating anything specific.
My assumption is baseball
AAA is the best you can get in minor leagues before you move to the major leagues
It comes from the publishers in the 90s. They needed an easy way to tell stores/distributors how popular they thought each of their games would be, to help them decide how many of a certain title the distributor should order. The games expected to be GotY contenders would be marked AAA, AA for otherwise decent games, A for more niche games and B for “this is a starshot, we’re hoping it will sell enough to justify production costs”. That then lead to more and more games being marked as AAA due to budgets getting increased, and the whole system became a bit redundant.
he games expected to be GotY contenders would be marked AAA, AA for otherwise decent games, A for more niche games and B for “this is a starshot, we’re hoping it will sell enough to justify production costs”.
Is there any evidence of this being the case? Personally, I don’t remember anything other than “AAA” back in the day, with other variations coming about much later as budgets grew and people wanted more specific delineations.
