Submitted 2 months ago by delitomatoes@lemm.ee to games@lemmy.world
It seems the general direction the internet is going and I’m all for it
I’m gonna release a AAAAA game. It’ll cost $95 and when you install it, it’ll just be a romhack of Super Mario World changing all the enemy sprites into butts. There’ll be a link to file complaints that just points to a terrible image made in ms paint that says “lol f u”.
My stock prices gonna hit the moon.
And for $70 more you can play it 2 days early! For why? No fucking reason other than to flex! Gotta flex on those poors by getting it earlier than them amirite?? This ensures you will be invested in our product from the very start and you are the type of person who we can do no wrong.
And for $30 there’s 2 extra skins that are just the worst looking piles of shit. But again if you don’t have them how will you flex on the poors? This is lumped in with the earlier assurance that we can do no wrong in your eyes.
And the battle pass is $10 - every 30 days. It has nothing of value except at tier 150, which is a new flagrantly pay to win weapon. This ensures we own your time, every month.
But also we didn’t finish the game, instead we released a roadmap. We will scrap this roadmap a week and a half after the disastrous launch because the game sucks so my donkey dick we cannot possibly add content to the absolute bugfest of a game. This is an abuse of loyalty to our brand, but you’ve stated you don’t care as long as you get to play it.
Now that the game is out for a month, we’ve added a cash shop. This flies in the face of regulation on the box not indicating gambling elements, but fuck those stooges standing in the way of our profits! We can make a new box with the proper markings on them in a month. Surely you would like to buy a sword skin or character skin beyond looking like normal Mario right?
We noticed you’re already level 8, congratulations! We halved level reward drops, but increased rarity of those items by 30% but from here on we tripled enemy hp.
You reached level 10 in only 5 hours? That’s amazing! How about a XP Booster? Like the above we actually made progression become ungodly slow after level 10 unless you pay us $35 for an XP booster - in a single player game.
Also we can’t help but notice you picked up a Fancy Locked Box. You can divert from the main quest to grind the crafting materials and it will take 6 hours to craft, OR you can buy a key for ONLY $5!
This comment is more effort than the person you’re responding to was going to put into the game.
Don’t forget the meta where a new paid DLC weapon is super unbalanced and great for two weeks until the devs nerf it into the ground and everyone goes back to the default weapons that are just ok.
I’ll only support this if I can pre-order it for double the price, and have an option at launch to pay an additional $50 to make the butt sprites into dickbutt instead
The $50 dickbutt DLC isn’t scheduled to be released until a month after the launch, but for an extra $70 you can get the limited edition collectors edition at launch, that comes with a cheaply made Mario-with-a-butt-instead-of-a-head limited edition figurine.
And for $40 you can also purchase the “getting started” pack–that includes a save file where we beat the game, so you don’t even have to play it. Your name, email address, and SSN will be on our first-to-finish list!
I’ll pay triple if I can play it 25 minutes before anyone else has access.
What about us whales? Can i pay triple and have a digital art book and a poorly painted plastic dickbutt figurine?
The extra A comes from the MBAs adding their grain of salt that no one wants.
So the extra A is for ‘Asshole’?
A (A Grade, not B grade)
AA A Advanced
AAA An Advanced Advertisment
AAAA An Advanced Advertising Arsehole.
To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles. Modest mid level titles from a studio between tentpole releases that would pay your bills and didn’t break the company if they didn’t sell well. It also generally related to the price you would be expected to pay. These days a AA/Indie game is $40, and a AAA title is $60/70. The rise of AAAA is a self aggrandizing to try and justify slapping a higher pricetag on products.
A great example would be an except from Activision in 2004. Doom 3 in August would be AAA, then in September a bunch of AA games - cod game “united offensive”, X-Men legends, Rome:total war, and Shark Tale. Then in October a AAA title with Tony Hawks underground 2.
Nowadays it’s either AAA or Indie. Around the turn of PS3/x360 games became seen as a product and companies became more focused on individual games moneymaking, so fewer and fewer AA games got made in favor of big blockbusters. Game companies went broke trying to compete in this new market, and because so much rides on individual games that when they fail the company is in danger of going belly up - and so gets bought. This is why you heard about all those acquisitions and power consolidation in the past 20 years of the game industry. Big boys with money to spend buying up the losers tables when they lose their win streak. About the turn of the 2010s and the changeover from PS4/XOne, the Indie Scene exploded in the vacuum left behind in the wake of those buyouts. Older Millennials who had been in college for programming games graduated and came to market and began publishing through steams Greenlight and even finding publishers not bought yet to make it to market. Games that were either easier to make or play and needed word of mouth. Sometimes you would have a real break out like Minecraft, super meat boy, Celeste, that would catch the attention of big studios and get the offer of a lifetime to sell out and go big. And that brings us to today. Now because of market stagnation AAA has kind of lost meaning, because so many games are releasing in a poor state. In an effort to set a title above the others, a couple of people have tried to dub a game “AAAA” to try and reinvoke that sense of quality and polish that used to come with AAA. This started in 2020 with a Perfect Dark reboot (The Initiative) from Microsoft. The game has yet to release. It was subsequently laughed at and dismissed as silly corpo nonsense. Then Ubisoft stated Beyond Good and Evil 2 would be AAAA, this went under the radar because the game is vaporware and no one cares. And so this brings us to Skibidi Bonesacks where Yves (the CEO) called it a “truly AAAA game” to try and set it above games like assassin’s creed and call of duty. And because it’s nothing more than a buzzword to allow anceo to stand on a stage self-felating, it released as a fucking disaster, like so many AAA games now anyway.
Skibidi Bonesacks
As one of those “older millennials” you referenced… What the fucking shit?
The meme is because Skull and bones is so bad of a fumble, to also just fumble its name. I picked it up from some review but I can’t remember who it was. Dunkey? Ah too long ago.
To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles.
To be a bit of a pendant, “AAA” was basically the marketing term to denote a game with a larger budget. The term “AA” came around afterwards as a way to distinguish between smaller indie games, and larger budget AAA games.
To be a bit of a pendant
To be a bit of a pedant, it’s pedant.
AAAA was a term said by a single out of touch Ubisoft executive for a single game that wasn’t very good. He was ridiculed for it at the time.
So AAAA means nothing. At all. Stop using it.
I think there is some merit to using it in a critical sense, just based on what happened that one time it was used.
To me, AAAA means a game that was given way too much budget for its scope, to its own detriment. Take what should be a niche, mid-budget game and pump it full of cash. The game becomes too big to fail and needs to use every “play it safe” strategy the MBAs demand in order to recoup its budget. So it aims for broad appeal, which makes it fail at being the niche game it was supposed to be, and it ends up flopping.
And AAAA is a reference to that Ubisoft exec. It doesn’t have any other meaning, so now it’s obviously just satire for a shitty game that the publisher is overconfident in and wants to charge too much money for (they were trying to defend the $70 price at the time).
AAAA is those tiny batteries that power electric pens
I mean, the only AAAA game, as called by someone trying to sell it, was complete dogshit… and I’ve already forgotten its name. So technically all AAAA games are bad :)
We need it for IPv6. Don’t hate
Mhh, DNSv6 (name doesn’t make sense but everyone still knows exactly what is said. Like “pointing toe”.)
I mean, it’s just DNS with an extra field type.
Yes, yes it is. The term coined by the Ubishit CEO trying to cover his own ass by claiming that Skull and Bones took so much time and money to make, and was being sold for higher than $60 (while still being a pile of shit) by saying it was a “AAAA game” and the term stuck. I mean, it’s own very first use was to describe a terrible AAA game. It’s only natural.
Oh hey, I forgot about that game’s existence until now. It’s name is so generic I used to accidentally call it Sea of Thieves, cause that’s a more memorable name. Also a more memorable game.
How to pronounce AAA: “Triple A.”
How to pronounce AAAA: “Aaaah!!!”
Artificial Abomination Absolutely Avoid
I looked at an “AAA” game maybe twice in give or take the last decade and both times have regretted it. Indy games are the bomb.
I mean, triple A just meant a big studio made it.
So I’m assuming quadruple A is going to be a game from a large study thats recently been bought by a giant corporation and fucked with everything despite not knowing video games.
So yeah, that’s pretty much what AAAA means, although some end up decent
Yes. The 4th A was to the front and it stands for Awful AAA game.
The extra A is for abomination.
I would say I really enjoyed Sony’s games the last few years but they also don’t seem to be able to tell their non-creatives to STFU and are damaging their games recently so I’m inclined to agree.
Oh sweet summer child. Capcom is on a very sharp edge imo.
Their games are solid, but everything around it is utter god damn dogshit.
Sf6? Very very solid base game, but to get all content since last year + the game you have to pay +200 euros.
Re4? Very solid remake, but prepare to loose performance on pc due to dunovo despite it being a single player game.
Re: the village? Very solid game, but better pay shit up and also loose performance despite ALSO being a single player game.
Megaman: mega who?
Monster hunter : safe, for now. Monster hunter wilds looks amazing and loads of fun, but watch them fuck it up somehow…
Monster Hunter and Devil May Cry and Dragon Age: full of insipid, unnecessary microtransactions ranging from regular consumable items, to cosmetics that were usually just included with the game normally. God I love Capcom’s games but I hate them as a company.
Wait, we’re doing quadruple As now?
An Ubisoft exec described Skull & Bones as the first AAAA game. Given the generally unfavorable reception this game got, “AAAA game” has become an expression of mockery.
Ubisoft are
That’s nothing. French porc offal sausages do five of them:
…wikipedia.org/…/Association_amicale_des_amateurs…
It’s also onomatopoeic, as it’s the sound one makes when first smelling one
Oh I do bloody love a bit of offal tho. I think that AAAAA screaming might be my guts, cos it’s deffo not my gob
It always did.
It just corresponds to the length of the scream now.
It means that the key is stuck.
Awful Alright Alright Alright
I don’t know, but if I ever create a meme game (assuming I ever got the opportunity), I’m definitely gonna market it as a AAAAAAAAAA game that was so good we had to downgrade it to a meme because your face would melt just by looking at the title screen due to how high quality it was.
Always has
slazer2au@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s just a marketing term. Just like AAA is a marketing term meaning we spent more money advertising this product than we spent on development.
aciDC14@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Ah, i guess the “A” in “AAA” stands for Advertisement.
ms_lane@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Monopoly Go is the only real AAAA
quafeinum@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Except that there was no advertising for concord lol.
CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
The A is for “Actually this game is $90 now instead of $60.”
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
It originated as a marketing term for Skull and Bones, right?
At this point, I suggest that it applies to basically any extremely costly game backed by a huge publisher that owns many development studios, that has been in development for over 4 years before any kind of release, ie, stuck in development hell, execs convinced its going to be a massive hit such that they sunken cost fallacy other games or even other studios out of existence so they can keep funding their uber project.
With a definition like this, Skull and Bones qualifies, so does Concord and Suicide Squad.
PlantJam@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Have any companies besides ubisoft used the term yet?
Aielman15@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I seem to remember MS claiming they were opening the “first AAAA dev studio” (The Initiative). Since then, the studio has been radio silent, lost a bunch of talent, and needed help from Crystal Dynamics to work on their first game (Perfect Dark reboot).
ms_lane@lemmy.world 2 months ago
iirc Sqaure Enix called Forspoken ‘AAAA’