The term "AAA" began to be used in the late 1990s by game retailers attempting to gauge interest in upcoming titles,[2] and first appeared in print in a press release from Infogrames in June 2000.
[4] One of the first video games to be produced at a blockbuster or AAA scale was Squaresoft's Final Fantasy VII (1997),[5] which cost an estimated $40–45 million (inflation adjusted $76–85 million) to develop,[6][7] making it the most expensive video game ever produced up until then, with its unprecedented cinematic CGI production values, movie-like presentation, orchestral music, and innovative blend of gameplay with dynamic cinematic camerawork.
[13] Triple-A titles produced during the late 1990s and early 2000s brought a shift towards more narrative-driven games that mixed storytelling elements with gameplay.
The same conditions also drove the growth of the indie game scene at the other end of the development spectrum, where lower costs enabled innovation and risk-taking.
[16] At around the period of transition from seventh to eighth generation of consoles, the cost of AAA development was considered by some to be a threat to the stability of the industry.
[21][22] Ubisoft game director Alex Hutchinson described the AAA franchise model as potentially harmful, stating he thought it led to either focus group-tested products aimed at maximizing profit, and/or a push towards ever higher graphics fidelity and impact at a cost of depth or gameplay.
[23] The limited risk-taking in the AAA arena and stagnation of new gameplay concepts led to the rise of indie games in the early 2010s, which were seen as more experimental.
[22] AAA game development has been identified as one environment where crunch time and other working pressures that negatively affect employees are particularly evident.
[17] In the mid 2010s large publishers began a focus on games engineered to have a long tail in terms of revenue from individual consumers, similar to the way MMO games generate income – these included those with expansion or season pass content such as with Destiny, Battlefield, and the Call of Duty series; and those which generated revenue from selling in-game items, sometimes purely cosmetic, such as Overwatch or League of Legends.
[17] The term shovelware has also been used to describe games that are quickly made without great care for the quality of the product as to make easy sales to consumers, as a metaphor for shoveling material onto a pile.