"The video game industry (often referred to as interactive entertainment) is the economic sector involved with the development, marketing and sale of video games. It encompasses dozens of job disciplines and employs thousands of people worldwide."
I've started taking a little look deeper into the industry and the different methods of development - the video game developer can either be a company, a small group or an individual; no matter how large they are still classed as developers. The type of game produced all relies on the budget, sometimes it's not the quality of the game but the marketing that makes it a best seller. That's where the classification of AAA games comes into play.
There's a lot of controversy with the classification, some people believe it's a useless rating system used by reviewers so I'll speak unbiased and state everything I write is pure research and not opinion (hah).
A developer may specialize in a particular platform eg. Xbox, Playstation or Wii and most choose to specialize in a certain genre of game eg. FPS (first person shooter), RPG (role-playing game) or RTS (real-time strategy). The rest focus on translating the language of a particular game or other software development.
A video game publisher maintains the development studios eg. Electronic Arts's EA Canada, Activision's Radical Entertainment, Nintendo EAD and Sony Polyphony Digital.
Third Party Developers - Third party developers are employed by a video game publisher to develop a certain game for one or more platforms. At the end of the day, what the publisher says here, goes as they are paying for the creation.
(Needs a bit more explanation here for my own benefit, I don't entirely understand the set up - Look into 'in-house development')
Independent Developers - Independent Developers are not owned by any publisher therefore they do not have that publisher to rely on when it comes to marketing and distributing their creation - From here they tend to rely on the internet and word of mouth to advertise their game.
Money plays a huge role within the industry, it's what everything all comes down to. As mentioned above, independent developers do not have the budget to market their games as a publisher would so this also has an adverse effect on the 'rating' of their games.
"AAA, or Triple-A, may be a three-letter acronym or may just mean something that is high-quality, premier, or excellent."
As previously stated, the typical classification of an AAA game isn't set in stone but most see it as a game that's been created within a high-budget. I'm not talking a couple of hundred, even thousands. I'm talking pushing into the tens of millions. There are a lot of other factors that are argued saying that a AAA game should have other influences other than just a high budget, for example:
- High-quality (a very talented group from an independent developer could possibly match with quality),
- A broad market,
- Bug free,
- Excellent marketing covering all possible areas,
- Fantastically appealing graphically (a top notch interface),
- Build up/hype,
- Perfect everywhere else pretty much (again, debatable from a reviewer/gamers view when it comes down to gameplay etc).
In conclusion, a high-budget doesn't make a fantastic game that sells brilliantly well, a lot do but a lot also fail.
A quote from nilkn on gamedev.net:
“So overall I suppose the term AAA just tries to capture how well the public knows about the title. Either the game gathers a lot of attention initially because of extremely high production values (like Crysis, for example), or it gains a lot of attention after release just because it’s such a good game, with or without production values. Because many games acquire the title simply from having state of the art graphics–thereby gathering much pre-release press coverage and hype–the term AAA cannot be a metric concerned primarily with gameplay quality.”
http://www.skillset.org/games/careers/article_3739_1.asp
(Fantastic site showing different sectors of the industry and their influences)
There's a lot of controversy with the classification, some people believe it's a useless rating system used by reviewers so I'll speak unbiased and state everything I write is pure research and not opinion (hah).
A developer may specialize in a particular platform eg. Xbox, Playstation or Wii and most choose to specialize in a certain genre of game eg. FPS (first person shooter), RPG (role-playing game) or RTS (real-time strategy). The rest focus on translating the language of a particular game or other software development.
A video game publisher maintains the development studios eg. Electronic Arts's EA Canada, Activision's Radical Entertainment, Nintendo EAD and Sony Polyphony Digital.
Third Party Developers - Third party developers are employed by a video game publisher to develop a certain game for one or more platforms. At the end of the day, what the publisher says here, goes as they are paying for the creation.
(Needs a bit more explanation here for my own benefit, I don't entirely understand the set up - Look into 'in-house development')
Independent Developers - Independent Developers are not owned by any publisher therefore they do not have that publisher to rely on when it comes to marketing and distributing their creation - From here they tend to rely on the internet and word of mouth to advertise their game.
Money plays a huge role within the industry, it's what everything all comes down to. As mentioned above, independent developers do not have the budget to market their games as a publisher would so this also has an adverse effect on the 'rating' of their games.
"AAA, or Triple-A, may be a three-letter acronym or may just mean something that is high-quality, premier, or excellent."
As previously stated, the typical classification of an AAA game isn't set in stone but most see it as a game that's been created within a high-budget. I'm not talking a couple of hundred, even thousands. I'm talking pushing into the tens of millions. There are a lot of other factors that are argued saying that a AAA game should have other influences other than just a high budget, for example:
- High-quality (a very talented group from an independent developer could possibly match with quality),
- A broad market,
- Bug free,
- Excellent marketing covering all possible areas,
- Fantastically appealing graphically (a top notch interface),
- Build up/hype,
- Perfect everywhere else pretty much (again, debatable from a reviewer/gamers view when it comes down to gameplay etc).
In conclusion, a high-budget doesn't make a fantastic game that sells brilliantly well, a lot do but a lot also fail.
A quote from nilkn on gamedev.net:
“So overall I suppose the term AAA just tries to capture how well the public knows about the title. Either the game gathers a lot of attention initially because of extremely high production values (like Crysis, for example), or it gains a lot of attention after release just because it’s such a good game, with or without production values. Because many games acquire the title simply from having state of the art graphics–thereby gathering much pre-release press coverage and hype–the term AAA cannot be a metric concerned primarily with gameplay quality.”
http://www.skillset.org/games/careers/article_3739_1.asp
(Fantastic site showing different sectors of the industry and their influences)
