Is it about popularity? The publisher of the game? Or maybe the quality?

  • @BananaTrifleViolin
    link
    English
    47
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    It is just a buzz word in the industry and doesn’t have a tight definition. It’s basically any big budget full priced game from a big or medium sized publisher. They’re just communicating that they’ve made a big budget game with an expectations of hopefully big sales and profit.

    It does imply the game should be popular and high quality, but those are not a given. Plenty of AAA games end up being trash and flopping yet they’re still AAA games.

    It’s similar to the Blockbuster concept in the film industry.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      151 day ago

      Exactly this, it’s a within-industry term that has leaked out to members of the public. It simply means “we put a lot of money into this, and we expect to make a lot back (for our investors)”

      As for where the ‘A’ terminology came from then that itself is likely a reuse of other entertainment industry terms.

      In the old days when you released a record album, you’d put the best tracks on the ‘A’ side and the less popular ones on the ‘B’ side.

      Similarly, we talk about ‘A-list’ celebrities abs ‘B-list’ celebrities, and use the term ‘B-movies.’ to denote low budget.

      And so what happens wben something gets “bigger and better than A?” Well, you just add more A’s!

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      10
      edit-2
      1 day ago

      Similarly “super food” means anything the marking team wants it to mean. Normally, I read that as “this food may be slightly healthier than eating candy, so we would really like you to give us your money, deceive yourself into thinking you’re doing something right, and feel good about it”.

      • bizarroland
        link
        fedilink
        61 day ago

        Any food that gets labeled as a “superfood” quickly falls prey to over farming, causing the nutrition quality of the food to plummet because the food is being grown too rapidly to absorb the nutrition from the environment the way that it did before it was aggressively over farmed by profit seeking corporations, causing it to quickly cease being any kind of a superfood.

      • FuglyDuck
        link
        English
        3
        edit-2
        1 day ago

        well, technically not ‘food’, but water is pretty much a superfood in that drinking sufficient amounts will improve virtually every aspect of people’s lives. (unless you happen to live somewhere with Republicanium Pipes™️)

        But yeah. It always cracked me up when people point to berries (those Acai stuff, for example) saying “super food” because they’re “high in good stuff”. Like. Every other damn berry.) (and those greenhouse strawberries we get in winter? Much lower carbon emissions.)