Dave the diver is definitely not an "AA" game. It's so indie looking it was nominated for multiple indie awards (even if it's not an actual indie game). DRG is not AA either, according to its homepage GhostShip has 32 people 4 years after launching it. Same for Spiritfairer, it was built by a team of 16.
Wasn’t the case earlier in development since they didn’t have big financial backing, Ghost Ship only grew after DRG had sales
> Deep Rock Galactic aired a trailer at E3 2017, then the game had a huge bump after its Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview launch in February 2018. Its Early Access didn't skyrocket the game "insanely high" like titles such as Valheim, but Pedersen said it was solid enough to know they had a success. At that time there were only 12 employees, and everyone was contracted "because we didn't know if we'd have money the next month."
Well yes that's what I said, I didn't find what numbers they had at the time but I indicated that they had 32 people (which generally falls short of AA in the first place) 4 years after launching a successful game, so they'd most likely have had even less before then.
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.
