Brian Boru
Moderator
AAA companies … Its a club and you need to prove you worthy of being in it.
Zed summed it up very nicely—you prove by spending many 10s of millions of dollars. No quality requirement, just like being in the Forbes or Fortune 500s doesn't make you a good person or company.
Any expectations of quality are due to assumptions made by consumers, sometimes based on past performance—not a reliable indicator—but more usually based on around half the budget being spent on marketing—an even more unreliable indicator.
AAA companies … get more attention from media whenever they so much as sneeze
As do almost all AAA anything in this world—celebrities, cities, military powers, pandas… More people are interested in AAA X than in Indie Y, so coverage gets more eyes or ears.
Feels like a marketing scam to me
No, just a shorthand business description.
Wasting several 100 million just in case it works.
Of course it works, otherwise it wouldn't be such a huge chunk of the budget. Unlike social media opinions, marketing initiatives are tested up the wazoo and continually refined to become even more deceptive and manipulative—isn't progress great?
So it's not "wasting", it's exactly the opposite. But take solace from:
“I am convinced that about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half.”
—probably John Wanamaker
being AAAA just means
No, not at all—see above.
$275 million GTA 5 reportedly cost to make
Which is ~$350 million adjusted for inflation, according to The Scotsman newspaper.
the economy has changed
It's not so much that—in GTA time world was coming out of Bush crash, these days we're coming out of Covid crash. The big difference is the games market has expanded hugely in the intervening decade, and is expected to continue significant increases for quite a while. So it's worth more marketing money cos the RoI is there.