I personally would consider 10-40 person teams to potentially qualify as AA. Often we also outsource code/art so the team size can sometimes be misleading.
I suppose I would go by the budget. Maybe 5-10million+ IMO. It also kind of depends how they spend the money.
EDIT : After some further reflection, From personal experience I'd consider a AA game one where everyone on the dev team knows each other fairly well. AAA games get so large that you don't end up knowing everyone super well by the end of the project.
> I suppose I would go by the budget. Maybe 5-10million+ IMO.
Which is not really useful, because we usually don't have budgets.
Team size x development time might be an approximation for it, but if you assume an average salary of 80k and a development time of 30 months, by your reckoning AA is a team of 50... which is basically the low end of what's normally considered an AA team size.
> From personal experience I'd consider a AA game one where everyone on the dev team knows each other fairly well. AAA games get so large
Team Meat is just two people, four if you include the producer and the composer, I would very much assume they knew each other fairly well, but there's no meaningful interpretation of AA where Super Meat Boy is an AA game.
> Which is not really useful, because we usually don't have budgets.
The majority of the AAA/AA projects I've worked on have budgets. I'm struggling to think of a project that didn't have a budget.
> Team Meat is just two people, four if you include the producer and the composer, I would very much assume they knew each other fairly well, but there's no meaningful interpretation of AA where Super Meat Boy is an AA game.
Of course you would expect a small indie team of 2-4 to know each other. I'm saying that once you hit AAA size teams that no longer becomes feasible.
> The majority of the AAA/AA projects I've worked on have budgets. I'm struggling to think of a project that didn't have a budget.
We don't have budgets, as in the people not involved in the project don't have any access to the projects so have no way to "rate" on that metric.
> Of course you would expect a small indie team of 2-4 to know each other. I'm saying that once you hit AAA size teams that no longer becomes feasible.
How is that relevant? This here discussion is about the lower limit of AA, not the higher one.
I suppose I would go by the budget. Maybe 5-10million+ IMO. It also kind of depends how they spend the money.
EDIT : After some further reflection, From personal experience I'd consider a AA game one where everyone on the dev team knows each other fairly well. AAA games get so large that you don't end up knowing everyone super well by the end of the project.