• sugar_in_your_tea
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      1 year ago

      Yes.

      In general:

      • AAA - big budget for both development and marketing; these usually make news headlines, regardless of quality, and most people hear of them
      • AA - usually focus on some niche with a moderate to high dev budget and moderate marketing budget; so something like Paradox or perhaps Double Fine (before MSFT acquisition)
      • indie - low budget games, usually through “bootstrapping”; some of these make headlines, but those are outliers

      Publishing is a separate discussion entirely. Some AAA games are self published, some use a separate publisher. Same goes for indies and AA games. I think it’s a lot less likely that indies will self publish because they just don’t have the skillset to market a game.

      I mostly buy indie and AA games because they tend to need to focus on some core game loop and can’t just throw the kitchen sink in like AAAs often can.