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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8877593" data-attributes="member: 18">You're fundamentally misunderstanding why things are called AAA.It's not about how good they are, in real terms. It's about the budget (which reflects the team size) and they level of quality they're aiming at (which is not always achieved in terms of gameplay and sometimes not even technical aspects, though that is rarer).A company can come out of nowhere and just make an AAA game, if they're just given enough budget, and can hire the right people. It doesn't matter at all if the developer or publisher has a "track record" of making "major video games". That's just a common association, that's all he's saying.Take God of War, for example, just off the top of my head. The rather generically-named "Santa Monica Studio" released one game before, which was a moderate success. Then they just came flying out of the gate with God of War back in 2005, which absolutely an AAA game for the era, hugely polished and impressive, almost no-one saw it coming.None of that prevents it being AAA. Do we need to go through hundreds of boring examples? I feel like we don't.Paradox releases primarily AA games, which is to say games with decent budgets and team sizes, but which aren't even intended to be AAA, though I would personally say CK3 is definitely pushing the edge there.</blockquote>