So reading up on some Korean/Japanese game company earnings reports, I’m starting to figure out what an “AAA” game actually is and why China, Korea and Japan are (suddenly) more focused on porting to PC.

Sony, and Black Myth: Wukong.

AAA is purely a measure of how large the budget is for the game, and Sony frequently talks about how their games cost multiple hundreds of millions of moneys to produce. They’re being ported to PC, which indicates that PC is a AAA viable platform which was previously only thought to be consoles.

Black Myth: Wukong and it’s global success also shows that there’s a real interest in eastern cultures outside of Asia, which nullifies the “They’re not interested in this kind of stuff” rhetoric that was previously believed.

It’s also just a money thing, PC is a “stronger market” than console and studios “expect their PC ports to outsell their console counterparts.”

Which makes me think back to Ubisoft and “Skull and Bones” being a “AAAA” game. They were talking about the cost of production, not the game quality. The game was in dev hell and cost three times as much as it should’ve because of it.

AAA isn’t a measure of the product itself, it’s a measure of how deep their pockets are and how much money they spent on this game. It’s capitalism.

So the entire “AA” and “AAA” label for games is meaningless, kind of how an “Indie game” no longer is synonymous with self-published as they often have a publisher who does some funding and marketing. It’s now also similarly a measure of how many people worked on the game and how much money was spent on development.

@ada I mean, yea. Always has been

The As are just a measure of how much money you have, same as with the credit rating

Other things I’ve learned from the earnings reports; many eastern game studios are starting to look into global representation (including LGBT recognition.)

The conclusion is that the cost of implementing it is minimal and simply expands the audience reach of the game so overall a net positive.

Also, collaborations with domestic anime IPs also is significantly underwhelming unless they also have had recent global reach (even for games that are only available domestically.) Which further reinforces their desire to expand their audience scope as cultures just become more global.

From the earnings report that SHIFT UP (Goddess of Victory: NIKKE, Stellar Blade) published:

We are disappointed with the performance of the Evangelion Collaboration Event. We believe the primary reason for this is that the collaboration characters failed to appeal to users despite preserving the originality of Evangelion.

https://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=300823

(Also this report directly cites Steam having AAA games now and Black Myth: Wukong as reasons why they’re porting Stellar Blade to PC)

@ada so basically sony is heading towards becoming a second party dev lol

@shroomie more or less, focus testing has shown that the younger generations tend to not know how to use a keyboard and mouse for games, only phone and controller so they’ll continue to exist, but they’ll likely end up porting more to PC.

@ada wow, weird (and kinda sad (regarding the keyboard and mouse thing specifically, like come on my controller has dozens of buttons and my mouse is basically magic))