Games

Ah, i guess the “A” in “AAA” stands for Advertisement.

It originated as a marketing term for Skull and Bones, right?

Realistically, its a corporate buzzword that is supposed to mean that the game delivers an exceptionally high quality experience, graphically, narratively, gameplay wise...

...but what it seems to actually mean is that the budget and manhour count and development calendar time ballooned to far greater than the original plan/estimates due to incompetent management.

At this point, I propose that 'AAAA' applies to basically any extremely costly game backed by a huge publisher that owns many development studios, that has been in development for over 4 years before any kind of release, ie, stuck in development hell, execs convinced its going to be a massive hit such that they sunken cost fallacy other games or even other studios out of existence so they can keep funding their uber project.

With a definition like this, Skull and Bones qualifies, so does Concord and Suicide Squad.

Basically... it doesn't have to be from a grandiose marketing campaign attached to a AAA game, its more about being stuck in development hell and continuously funded to the point of destroying other parts of the business making it, like a financial cancer.

Have any companies besides ubisoft used the term yet?

And for $70 more you can play it 2 days early! For why? No fucking reason other than to flex! Gotta flex on those poors by getting it earlier than them amirite?? This ensures you will be invested in our product from the very start and you are the type of person who we can do no wrong.

And for $30 there's 2 extra skins that are just the worst looking piles of shit. But again if you don't have them how will you flex on the poors? This is lumped in with the earlier assurance that we can do no wrong in your eyes.

And the battle pass is $10 - every 30 days. It has nothing of value except at tier 150, which is a new flagrantly pay to win weapon. This ensures we own your time, every month.

But also we didn't finish the game, instead we released a roadmap. We will scrap this roadmap a week and a half after the disastrous launch because the game sucks so my donkey dick we cannot possibly add content to the absolute bugfest of a game. This is an abuse of loyalty to our brand, but you've stated you don't care as long as you get to play it.

Now that the game is out for a month, we've added a cash shop. This flies in the face of regulation on the box not indicating gambling elements, but fuck those stooges standing in the way of our profits! We can make a new box with the proper markings on them in a month. Surely you would like to buy a sword skin or character skin beyond looking like normal Mario right? Also there will be at least 1 skin that blends in with the background a little too well and attracts p2w allegations for the multiplayer mode. We don't care and neither do you because you will buy it. You wanna be a winner right?

We noticed you're already level 8, congratulations! We halved level reward drops, but increased rarity of those items by 30% but from here on we tripled enemy hp at every 10 levels to make sure the game is a slog, so you buy overpowered shit from the shop and battle pass.

You reached level 10 in only 5 hours? That's amazing! How about a XP Booster? Like the above we actually made progression become ungodly slow after level 10 unless you pay us $35 for an XP booster - in a single player game. We will make sure this pops up every time you level up to remind you we intentionally slowed progression so you make this purchase.

Also we can't help but notice you picked up a Fancy Locked Box. You can divert from the main quest to grind the crafting materials and it will take 6 hours to craft, OR you can buy a key for ONLY $5! This will pop up EVERY time you pick up a Locked Box with the option to go to the shop, and be SUPER disruptive, to get you to cave.

And lastly, a "donate" button on the main menu where you just give us money for nothing, because at this point why not right?

I'll only support this if I can pre-order it for double the price, and have an option at launch to pay an additional $50 to make the butt sprites into dickbutt instead

So the extra A is for 'Asshole'?

Skibidi Bonesacks

As one of those "older millennials" you referenced... What the fucking shit?

To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles.

To be a bit of a pedant, "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.

Edit: Corrected spelling.

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).

Oh hey, I forgot about that game's existence until now. It's name is so generic I used to accidentally call it Sea of Thieves, cause that's a more memorable name. Also a more memorable game.

My assumption is baseball

AAA is the best you can get in minor leagues before you move to the major leagues

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-A_(baseball)

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.

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

That's nothing. French porc offal sausages do five of them:

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_amicale_des_amateurs_d%27andouillette_authentique

It's also onomatopoeic, as it's the sound one makes when first smelling one