SOME studios work on more than one project at a time. There's absolutely zero evidence that Larian does this. By what we actually know, they were entirely committed to Baldur's Gate 3 and nothing else.
You're literally just going to argue anything to avoid admitting it's a AAA game, huh? We're not having a discussion, you're just trying to 'win' the argument.
So I've been providing reasons why I don't consider Baldur's Gate 3 a game in the AAA category, I'm not avoiding the discussion here, you are welcome to provide reasons why you believe it is AAA rated.
If I go back to the history of gaming, the term AAA was coined to follow the same thing as bonds. AAA bonds designated a higher chance of guaranteed return on investment - and eventually games were categorized in this way. And for the most part it worked, AAA games were a formula of game designed for massive mainstream appeal with little risk provided they invested enough into the game to hit high return on investment mark. This is why AAA games that _flop_ are so painful for studios and typically 2 or 3 of these flops in a row and the publisher is done.
When we look at _Riskier_ investments, you are now moving into the AA category of games. These are niche titles that are designed for a small market and has less guarantee on investment. These are still costly to make, so making them cheaper to make is the obvious way to reduce risk. We now also have crowd funding, and now we have early access, further reducing that risk. A lot of AA rated titles are crowd funded and early access now to reduce the risk of investment up front.
The AA or AAA is not a designation of experience or the size of people working on a title, though, there is a large correlation between expenditure in both marketing and development, and typically AAA games have significantly more of both over AA.
In the recent times, we see that AAA games are now full of micro transactions, seasons, and all sorts of other methods to monetize users, and AA titles are not. Why? Because AA titles usually never hit critical massive sales, thus, making microtransactions a negatives investment for them (but when they do, the payback is enormous). If only 1 out of 10,000 players are buying, it's not a lot of microtransactions if your game only sells up to 1-2 million copies, anything less than 500K copies sold is probably considered indie, and indie is considered successful at 100K copies sold. Most of these AA games are riskier titles, with changes to their game design that would not typically be found in AAA gaming, like a call of duty.
If you have a problem with me calling Baldur's Gate 3 AA, you should really look at the entire catalog of gamepass titles, as it's full of AA titles, some websites go as far to label Control as AA.
https://gamerant.com/best-aa-games-xbox-series-xs/#ace-combat-7-skies-unknown
Here's another list for the best AA titles:
https://omnigameplayer.com/best-aa-games-you-can-play-2023/
Now that I've defined my boundaries, when I look at Baldurs' Gate, I see a game that started out in early access with staggered platform releases, designed for a niche western RPG market. It's a high quality product, but it's not AAA. That doesn't mean it's a bad game. What I would struggle with is finding a "full on" AAA title, like CoD, Halo, Gears, Assassin's Creed, etc - that would release as an early access and have a staggered multiplatform release. I've not known one, and you're welcome to provide examples.
