My understanding is AAA is literally just a buzzword in the vein of AAAA. It doesn’t relate to budget, team size, publisher/no publisher, kind of same as indie at this point.
It maybe made a little more sense when it was a publisher descriptor? EA, Activision, Ubisoft were publishing games at a different scale than Midway, Acclaim, THQ, etc. But still, as far as I understand is more of a marketing term as opposed to designating anything specific.
When I dug into this for myself I landed on Ghost!
Valve being a private company is probably the thing that allows them to focus on putting out good products w/o dealing with shareholders demanding more.
And they make a ton of money doing right by their core consumer base, I would be very surprised if we see any of that change.
If Valve were any other company they would have laid off half their staff and coasted on that 30% from Steam. They’re not perfect, but maybe the only company I feel good about giving money to, consistently.
That’s what killed it for me. I really enjoyed the Lawbreakers beta, but paying $30 for a game that would either die at a fixed price or quickly shift to F2P made no sense.