Unity can't make good Triple A games?

Nice how you marked and checked the not important part about what additional meanings some people give it. Additional to budget.
The important part (that you ignored) was:

Very much not check for Hearthstone.

As I thought, you cannot name a single one if we use the Wikipedia definition of AAA and not your own.

 

Your own references do not define the budget to compare any game to, and at the bottom of the page they contradict the top of the page, so I don't really see any point in referencing any games because you won't be happy unless GTA V was made in Unity.

What difference does the budget make anyway? Medieval Engineers and Space Engineers have moderate budgets and rake in piles of cash, among plenty of other super-effectively developed games with moderate budgets.

You're asking a question with zero technical specifications, ambiguous terms and minimal return for actually resolving it.

 

I think the wikipedia definition is very clear. That some people assume that quality should good for AAA games is shaded by the usage of the word "expected". It is an optional additional part. Nothing is black and white in life.

As for the example. Of course there is no clear line between AAA and almost AAA. But it should be among the larger budgets of that year to be AAA. If that is in the order of the top 10 or top 50 does not matter. But if it is orders of magnitude away it is not AAA. It is that simple.
Nothing is black and white in life, but if it is almost black we don't have to argue if it is white.

 

You literally have no idea what the budget for Hearthstone is. It, like all other Blizzard games, is a game that will last for years and years. This means paying some of the best paid game developers for years and years to work on the game. The budget is ongoing. The advertising budget for it is likely higher than most other games. The esports budget for it is certainly higher than most other games. The localization budget is certainly higher than most other games.

Please, please tell me why you think Hearthstone is low budget.

 

I'm quite certain you literally have no idea what you're talking about.

If you can't specify a proper criteria for your question, then it doesn't compile.

 

Well, again, this is both an ambiguous and misused perception. I normally reference this episode of Extra Credits to explain the difference between technical and artistic quality. Bottom line, having the most capable technical specs does not equate with having the best graphics. Some degree of artistic proficiency, and wisely-applied design principles, will always win out over rendering prowess. Massive budgets for both the technical and asset-production side of things don't guarantee quality.

Again, it isn't the tools available, it's how well you are able to use those tools. Having good tools as a baseline is of course desirable. But having the best tools is no guarantee of success or quality. The theoretical best situation is to have someone with extensive experience and talent using the best possible tools, with an unlimited amount of time and resources. But this is very rarely the case.

In the case of the current discussion, it is true that Unity is perhaps not the best tool. However, it is a very good, and capable tool. It's use in big-budget development is less a matter of the tool itself, and more a matter of policy set by major publishers. (not developers)

 

Because 20 and fewer people are much cheaper than the 100+ people AAA games use. It is a relative measure. And Hearthstone is cheap compared to the expensive titles each year.

 

I gave you "top 20" budgets and because I am nice you can use top 50 budgets to name one. Among "highest development budgets" seems to be easy to understand for most. It means if you are orders of magnitude away from the large ones, you are not AAA. But I think you intentionally don't want to understand.

Edit: but you wanted to use the much more shady definition of "nice game" instead of this which is much more precise and objective. Haha.

 

Aha so what you're actually asking is:

"Have any games in the year 20xx been among the top 20 highest development cost budgets?"

This isn't the easiest to understand, its the correct way to ask your question. "Unity can't make good Triple A games?" is the absolute wrong way to ask that. Its not even remotely close to that question, in fact.

I'm not actually sure why you would even want to know the answer to that question since it doesn't have any bearing on whether or not a game is financially successful so my advice is to find something else to do with your time, like asking "How can I make a low-budget game that earns me lots of money?". After all, this is a developers forum.

You could reference this list and cross reference it with games developed in Unity. Have fun!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

 

Takes 1 minute. Answer: 0

 

According to Blizzard themselves they had only 15 people working on it up to release and not all of them fulltime. Not chump change by any means but not the same as the games with credits of hundreds. The budget for ongoing support once it was a big hit is of course much larger but the actual development budget wasn't enormous.

 

I'm happy to know that actually. Clearly, after considering the showcase of games, I can see that Unity has a low entry cost and high returns.

Cool!

 

Even by your strict definition of "AAA" (ignoring the remaining wiki explanation of the term), do you have any idea just how big the budget is for one of Blizzard's smaller (compared to WoW) games? Think about how much they've spent on marketing and expansions, and then think about just how expensive it is to host servers for a game with over 25 million registered users. If we had to rank the top 10 or 15 most expensive games to produce, market, and host in 2014, would Hearthstone make that list? What exactly is the budget threshold (by the initial wiki definition) for a "AAA" game these days, in a time when large developers are trying to spend less to develop their big hits?

Sorry to bust your b*lls about all this, but I think even by your definition, it's more likely that Hearthstone is "AAA" than it isn't. But without both Blizzard financials and a specific budget definition, there's no way to say for certain.

Exactly.

 

No it was created by 15. Now about 20. At all time some people only work part time on it. It is created in a way that they don't even need programmers anymore. I actually informed myself how it is built and how they work. Did you?
From that numbers alone you can calculate that is not among the expensive games.

 

The question in the thread is whether or not Unity CAN be used to make "AAA" (big-budget) games. All the "research" you've been presenting seems to be targeted at proving that Unity HASN'T been used to make "AAA" (big-budget) games. In the context of the original post, your entire argument is pointless. Even if Unity has been used to make zero big-budget games in the past two decades, it wouldn't determine whether or not it's use in that context was possible. Potential and execution are two different things.

Quibbling over the budget of Hearthstone is meaningless.

 

I only wrote what I wrote because some people said there were many AAA games made with Unity. And because some said Hearthstone is an example.

Both are wrong if you use the common definition of AAA (e.g. the one from Wikipedia). There are zero AAA games made with Unity. Just wanted to correct that wrong information.

 

But hey, you could always go edit the page to your liking. I mean, thats how it works.

 

You again quote a not important part about "intention" where it above clearly says it has nothing to do with actual quality but with budget. But yes ignore the main part of the definition if you like.

 

Putting aside the narrow definition of "AAA", what makes you think that Hearthstone's budget is not among the top 50? Servers, marketing, expansions, these add up.

Why is that first line of the wiki the "important" part, but the rest invalid?

 

So technically you're saying I could spend 100 million bucks to make a game, have zero returns, and slap a AAA classification on it.

lawl.

 

I explained above that from time size you see that it is a small budget. 15 people is what Epic uses to create a GDC demo, it is so far away from any AAA game staff size that that alone tells you it cannot be expensive. There are hundreds of games each year with much larger teams.
But I start repeating myself over and over. So have a nice day.

 

http://crowfall.com/#/news/were-using-unity-5

 

Spam???
Or is this on the subject of AAA? A AAA game that uses Kickstarter, lol.

 

Well frankly, your cut-off point for big-budget games is a bit restrictive. Most commercially-produced games these days clock in at no less than 1 million dollars for production, and often several times that for promotion. (marketing and advertising) And that is a conservative estimate. Most small-budget games come in somewhere below that. Hobbyist games can have zero budget.

However, the industry as it exists right now is producing hundreds of games every year. That is hundreds of games that fall into that commercially-developed, 1-million+ budget category. Annually. Attempting to narrow your definition by the 50 largest-budget games produced recently is a very narrow range. Besides, the largest-budget games usually include a number of MMOs. (one of the most expensive genres to produce) Lumping in 100-million+ budget games with 1-million+ budget games is a bit of a stretch.

Also, I wouldn't harp on Hearthstone too much. Yes, it was made with a smaller team internal to Blizzard. But it also had virtually unlimited access to Blizzard's art department and marketing department. Those expenses were probably not calculated into any analysis of the game's expense. (most likely because they are existing investments) I've seen all of the on-line advertising for Hearthstone, and a lot of the art that went into the game's production. That stuff didn't just materialize out of the ether.

 

There is no real definition of AAA and, consequently, is tied to each individual's perception of what "AAA quality" is.

For some people, the gameplay in Angry Birds could be considered AAA - and for some, yes, the graphics could be considered AAA for those individuals.

For others, nothing short of Crysis graphics and physics would be considered AAA.

Its all relative. There is no actual standard definition. And there shouldn't be, because different people value different things in a game, and place different weights on the different aspects of a game.

For all intents and purposes, roughly 100 million people consider Candy Crush AAA (minus probably 20%-ish who play a wider variety of games and have formulated a different world view on AAA quality) because they daily find some type of value in it (at least enough value to play it daily).

 

By just inverting or ignoring the common definition of AAA in games.

 

There is no common definition of AAA.

 

Common is what most people mean by it. E.g. what ends up on Wikipedia. In this case AAA = highest development budgets. I never hear it used differently actually, except on this forum.

 

Look, I don't know what your credentials are, but I have worked seven years for one of the biggest game developers and publishers in the world. Games I have worked on have won Game of the Year Awards three times - most game developers would die for winning an award like that just once.

Your definition is not correct - and whoever put that in Wikipedia doesn't know what they are talking about. There is NO common definition for AAA.

 

Hundreds of games with larger budgets than Hearthstone, in 2014? Feel free to list 50.

 

Alright. In that case, I change my answer to 'maybe if rich people decide to dump tons of money into assets for a unity project'.

@RichardKain that's pretty straightforward, thanks. It's sad that 'AAA' refers to budget more than anything else haha. I feel like AAA is a bad thing then since so many good things come from small budgets, which prove that any game approaching the AAA label is either poorly managed or maybe blowing money on kevin spacey's face.

 

Then call it "most common" if you have a problem with the word "common". What would you say is the "most common" definition of AAA in games?

 

"Sorry, big game publisher, but it's not "AAA" anymore if you manage to produce that game of the year too far under budget. Good luck at the Indie awards!"

Budget alone really is a silly, short sighted definition.

Perhaps a more relevant topic would have been "Can Unity make a great game that's highly profitable?" I imagine this is what developers care most about, and the answer is obvious.

 

"This game is terrible! I would rate it lower but they spent just enough money to make it into the AAA class - damn those clever bastards!... 10/10"

 

That's why many of us would prefer that the use of the term "AAA" be dropped entirely. It's misleading. Budget can directly relate to scope, but it has little to do with quality. And honestly, even the scope argument has started to become murky thanks to many of the recent advances in procedural programming.

Once upon a time, the thought of a game with a similar experience scope to Skyrim would be unthinkable on a budget smaller than 10 million dollars. But now we have procedural games like Minecraft and Terraria that can easily match or even surpass the experience scope of big-budget titles. Massive amounts of pre-constructed content is no longer the driving force that it once was.

Referring to development in terms of budget also opens things up to greater granularity. Big-budget can be defined a bit more clearly. And you can tack on mid-budget, low-budget, micro-budget, or even no-budget. With "AAA" you really only have "AA", or "A" that you could step down to, and none of those has ever been clearly defined.

One of the best things about Unity is that it makes it possible to produce high-quality games without spending an obscene amount of money. This isn't a drawback, it's an advantage. Arguing over why more big-budgets aren't utilizing Unity is pointless when we have recent success stories like Cities: Skylines and Besiege to wave around. Spending less and making decent profits isn't something to be ashamed of, but to celebrate.

 

Only if you mean "current-gen console hardware".

 

"Steve, lets just set the budget for our game to 2 billion dollars so it can be AAA, then we'll just never spend the budget and still get the title! Ha!"

 

Interesting note: The two games I'm playing most right now are Cities: Skylines and Hearthstone, both made in Unity. Who'd have thunk??? They both feel "AAA" to me, if the term has to be used. But more importantly, they both rock and they are both producing oodles of cash for their makers.

 

I think it's fair to classify it as a "triple A" game based on its ongoing budget as well. This is if you want to classify a game as "triple A" based only on its budget, which I think is silly. Triple A refers to many aspects of a game imo, including budget, graphics, gameplay, replayability, reviews, etc. There really isn't an actual definition of '"triple A," and it's stupid to continue this argument tbh.

 

People can classify it how they want - that is the rub, though. Each individual person can classify AAA as to what is most important or of most interest to them (budget, graphics, gameplay, story, etc...). Nobody is right, but then again nobody is wrong either. Each person is correct, actually, relative to what they perceive AAA as.

So people can continue arguing about whether or not this game or that game is AAA, when in reality, its relative to that individual.

At the end of the day, I enjoy making games. I also have to put food on the table. At the moment the game that is making the most money while spending the least amount in development is probably Candy Crush, lol - yes, more than CoD because while CoD makes a lot of money it also costs a lot more to make - the profit margin is significantly less than Candy Crush).

I could not care any less if someone classified Candy Crush as AAA or not AAA.

 

Sure it can, AAA is mostly the budget for arts and graphics.
Unity 4 has weak lighting though, so for FPS style games, it was behind the curve a lot, Unity 5 opens that up quite a bit.

Most AAA studios are moving towards Unity, there are some that use their own internal engines, or have the time, team and budget to use something like Unreal with tens of thousands of man hours in level design.

There are still limitations and short sighting with Unity, but there is no reason a AAA studio cannot make something fantastic.

 

Sure, I'm not the one saying there has to be one definition. Personally I feel AAA is synonymous with "big budget" because that's how I've always interpreted it. It's a silly thread in general. I definitely think Unity could be used to create what I consider AAA but I find it unlikely. Not because of the quality it is capable of but how it can be difficult to work on the same project concurrently with a large number of people without rewriting large chunks of the workflow, at which point you might decide to just go custom.

 

I could list about ten... from my company alone.

 

Exactly. I wouldn't classify Candy Crush as AAA because nothing about it is above and beyond. It doesn't have a high budget, good graphics, good sound, innovative gameplay, good story, etc.

 

You couldn't, because the budget for Hearthstone isn't public knowledge, nor do you have any idea how much they spend in post production on advertising, marketing, legal, support, localization, esports, etc.

 

He works for Disney making Star Wars games. I guarantee you they have more budget than Hearthstone.

 

Sort of... About 20 core developers. But when you are talking about a studio in a bigger company, it's important to understand that a lot of infrastructure is shared. There is probably double that in support staff (BI, Analytics, backend, marketing, tech-ops, it, etc, etc...). Not to mention a pretty large chunk of the production art is outsourced. But It is definitely small for a large game. Though 20 inside inside Blizzard can accomplish much more than 20 not get the benefits of shared resources. (even with the additional bureaucracy that comes with it).

 

You can't make a guarantee like that when there is literally nothing to back it up.

Also, you say that as if Star Wars games are so much bigger than Blizzard games. Over 25 MILLION players have played Hearthstone. There's no star wars game in the history of the franchise that has had even close to that many players. I really doubt that the budget for a single Star Wars game, including SWTOR, the biggest Star Wars game, is bigger than the ongoing budget of any Blizzard game.

EDIT: SWTOR's budget might be higher, but that's because it had a really high initial development budget. Hearthstone will still be growing and played by millions of people 5 years from now, so it's ONGOING budget will be higher by then.

 

The 20 people working on Hearthstone must have astronomically huge salaries to make them more expensive than SWTOR...
With a little common sense you realize that what you say makes no sense even if we don't know the advertising budgets exactly.

 

I also have friends that work on Hearthstone, (and joining the team now).

And yea, he have huge budget games, though that is relative. A simple game for us will have a much higher budget than the exact same game done by a much smaller company. It's an IP/scale thing. An Indie could produce Hearthstone much cheaper than Blizzard. The bigger you get the more expensive production gets.