The term "AAA" began to be used in the late 1990s by game retailers attempting to gauge interest in upcoming titles. The term was likely borrowed from the credit industry's
bond ratings, where "AAA" bonds represent the safest investment opportunity and are the most likely to meet their financial goals. One of the first video games to be produced at a
blockbuster or AAA scale was
SquareSoft's
Final Fantasy VII (1997), making it the
most expensive video game ever produced up until then, with its unprecedented
cinematic CGI production values,
movie-like presentation and innovative blend of gameplay with dynamic cinematic
camerawork. Its expensive advertisement campaign was also unprecedented for a video game, with a combined production and marketing budget estimated to be (inflation adjusted ). By the
seventh generation of video game consoles (late 2000s), AAA game development on the
Xbox 360 or
PlayStation 3 game consoles typically cost in the low tens of millions of dollars ($15–20 million) for a new game, with some sequels having even higher total budgets – for example
Halo 3 is estimated to have had a development cost of $30 million, and a marketing budget of $40 million. According to a
whitepaper published for
EA games (Dice Europe), the seventh generation saw a contraction in the number of video game developing houses creating AAA level titles, reducing from an estimated 125 to around 25, but with a roughly corresponding fourfold increase in staffing required for game development. Triple-A titles produced during the late 1990s and early 2000s brought a shift towards more narrative-driven games that mixed storytelling elements with gameplay. The earlier widespread adoption of
optical media from early-1990s had brought elements like
cutscenes, and the advances in real-time
3D graphics in the mid-1990s further drove new ways to present stories; both elements were incorporated into
Final Fantasy VII. With larger budgets, developers were able to find new innovative ways to present narrative as a direct part of gameplay rather than interspersed into pre-rendered cutscenes, with
Half-Life one of the first of these new narrative games to nearly eliminate cutscenes in favor of interactive storytelling mechanisms. During the seventh generation, AAA (or "blockbuster") games had marketing at a similar level to high-profile films, with television, billboard and newspaper advertising; a corresponding increasing reliance on sequels, reboots, and similarly franchised
IP was also seen, in order to minimize risk. Costs at the end of the generation had risen as high as the hundreds of millions of dollars – the estimated cost of
Grand Theft Auto V was approximately $265m. The same conditions also drove the growth of the
indie game scene at the other end of the development spectrum, where lower costs enabled innovation and risk-taking. At around the period of transition from seventh to eighth generation of consoles, the cost of AAA development was considered by some to be a threat to the stability of the industry. The failure of a single game to meet production costs could lead to the failure of a studio –
Radical Entertainment was closed by parent
Activision despite selling an estimated one million units on console in a short period after release. Triple-A games also began to lose uniqueness and novelty; a common trend were a range of "grey brown"
first-person shooters that drew on the popularity of the
Medal of Honor and
Call of Duty series but did little to advance gameplay improvements. Ubisoft game director Alex Hutchinson described the AAA franchise model as potentially harmful, stating he thought it led to either
focus group-tested products aimed at maximizing profit, and/or a push towards ever higher graphics fidelity and impact at a cost of depth or gameplay. The limited risk-taking in the AAA arena and stagnation of new gameplay concepts led to the rise of
indie games in the early 2010s, which were seen as more experimental. This also led to the creation of the "AA" market in the industry, larger studios that were not at the scale of AAA developers but had more experience, funding, and other factors to make them distinct from the smaller teams usually associated with indie studios. In a 2023 report by the UK
Competition and Markets Authority which blocked the
proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft it was stated that AAA games that were greenlit for a potential release in 2024 and 2025 received an average development budget of $200 million and up an increase from an average of a $50 million to $150 million from 2018. Court documents presented in a case accusing Activision of contributing towards the
Uvalde school shooting revealed that the budgets for three
Call of Duty games released between 2015 and 2020 had budgets of $450 million to $700 million. == Related terms ==