No one is being tricked on my end. It is implied through adverts. When a product is being advertised and people see AAA they think big budget equals high quality and to say otherwise is disingenuous. They wouldn't advertise the product just to simply tell everyone how much money they spent, it's absurd. If AAA only meant budget then it would be a waste of time to use the term as an advert hook. I wouldn't use a Wikipedia if you are trying to teach people lessons about not being a sucker.

He didn't read the article. They talk about the terms origin and how it didn't refer to games until the 90s.

@thor

I read the article. It's all people's relationship with a word. I don't discount their relationship. I made a statement about how the word has meaning in the general public.

I'm not arguing etymology here. That is obscure. I am talking about how the word has meaning to the general public. To think it only a definition without an implication is short.

People think big budget means high quality. To say otherwise is disingenuous and being obscure. In your own reply you used the term "talent". If talented people are working on something, what are the expectations of the public product?

@anast

High budget doesn’t inherently mean the “qulaity” I think @Solo is meaning, but that’s not the point of the AAA label. AAA is an industry term that describes the scale of investment and team size, not quality.

Hades is a great title, but remains an indie title because of its smaller budget and team. Starfield, despite its divisive reception, is undeniably AAA due to its production scale. Talent doesn’t guarantee perfection, but it defines ambition—and AAA reflects the ambition of resources, not just results.

I don’t know what your definition of “quality” is, but a AAA game does have significantly higher quality visuals and production values than a AA or indie venture, regardless of your feelings on the game experience, itself.

But I don’t think the word “quality” is being used in the right sense here. I think @Solo is referring to his enjoyment of a game vs the shift in corporate decisions most AAA games have gone in. While there’s argument to be had that Hades is a “quality” experience, it’s still not a AAA game in terms of production costs and amount of developers on the project, no matter how you try to argue it is.

I should’ve used a better word than “talent” in my previous post. I was really meaning the amount of devs on the project. Indie and AA games have amazing talent working on them, just not the budget or amount of devs that a AAA venture has. That’s really the defining factor between the two. For example, imagine the same amount of staff and budget working on a Hades game that worked on Spider-Man 2. It would be a higher “quality” game, maybe not necessarily a higher “quality experience” of a game, but the visuals and production in the game would more than likely be “higher quality.”

Hope that makes better sense.

But your instinct went straight for the word "talent", your reply is filled with quality. Quality in a product is taken wholistically by the consumer. To think otherwise is incorrect and vastly minimizes the strength of implication which is a synonym for meaning, when it comes to advertising.