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Do Paradox games count as "Triple A"?

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While I think that most if not all current Paradox games would not be considered AAA, I do not believe that it is because Paradox games do not have a mass market appeal. From what I underdstand, many of the newer GSGs have sold over a million copies, and I would argue that a new GSG from Paradox could potentially sell something like 10 million copies or more in the near future. Paradox Development Studio already has rare resouces in the form of talent, experience, and technology making a very unique and interesting product that cannot be easily replicated by their direct and indirect competitors. I don't believe Paradox would need to pool all of their resources to make a Game of the Year contender, but possibly put more money into polishing and marketing the game and building up hype around a specific unique narrative for the press and gamers to get excited about.

I loved the quote from Shams on the Paradox Podcast about starting small and iteratively building towards a massive worldwide success like Witcher 1, Witcher 2, and then Witcher 3.
 
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artemis667 said:
They don't count as triple A. Triple A games typically have huge resources invested at every stage of the development, elaborate design for world and characters, famous voice actors, produced music scores, cutting edge graphics, big marketing budgets, and they depend on mass market appeal, strong margins on high volume sales to recoup the massive costs.
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Yes, THIS is what AAA means- broad marketing, HUGE budgets, and LARGE development teams. I think of COD or Battlefield when I think of AAA games. Fallout, Skyrim, Diablo, WoW, Red Dead Redemption. It is all about how much resources are pooled and the quality of the end product- very high-end graphics, music, and famous voice-acting. If you ever see an advertisement for a game on TV, not just online, chances are that it is an AAA game.
 
I don't know much about the rating system. I would just say single A.
 
Paradox is not a triple A company.
 
SirAlexius said:
I loved the quote from Shams on the Paradox Podcast about starting small and iteratively building towards a massive worldwide success like Witcher 1, Witcher 2, and then Witcher 3.
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So Witcher 1 was A, Witcher 2 AA and Witcher 3 AAA?
 
pedrito_elcabra said:
Are we talking about the Firaxis handling of the Civ series?

I have always loved the Civ series, but I wish Paradox took it over. Post release development on those titles is very limited, they get a couple DLC each and that's it.

Two years after release Civ6 still feels incredibly crude, I think actually today Civ5 still has a larger active multiplayer community than Civ6 because of how bad the latter is. It's all shiny graphics and talking heads and voice acting with very, very little substance. It is still a strategy game, but just barely.
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Is Civ5 generally considered better than 6? I haven't really gotten super into a Civ since IV, but V was....just a complete nonentity to me. I played a couple games of it, but...I honestly don't think I can actually remember anything about that game. But I loaded up a game of vanilla VI the other day and surprised myself with how much fun I had with it, and Gathering Storm is the first Civ expansion in years that I'm actually considering dropping full price on. (Though on the "shiny bits vs substance" level, I do have to admit that Sean Bean adds like 500 extra brownie points for me)
 
Alehkra said:
Is Civ5 generally considered better than 6? I haven't really gotten super into a Civ since IV, but V was....just a complete nonentity to me. I played a couple games of it, but...I honestly don't think I can actually remember anything about that game. But I loaded up a game of vanilla VI the other day and surprised myself with how much fun I had with it, and Gathering Storm is the first Civ expansion in years that I'm actually considering dropping full price on. (Though on the "shiny bits vs substance" level, I do have to admit that Sean Bean adds like 500 extra brownie points for me)
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I'm not sure if there is a consensus on this. Obviously high profile magazines like Rock Paper Shotgun keep heaping praise on VI, but they'll heap praise on almost any AAA title out there, and did in its day on V.

Personally, I think VI adds a lot of new and interesting concepts. But, and it's a massive but, it is a much much more RNG driven game than V. In V you had some powerful natural wonders, but nothing as gamebreaking as VI. Also, In VI meeting a few city states early means a huge advantage, while spawning next to a single barb camp with horses can totally cripple your early game. And the list just goes on and on.

Now this doesn't have to be bad. Some people like RNG, and that's fine. For me it's a big issue with a strategy game. Some games I do incredibly well, and I realise that 90% of my success is based on RNG favor. That takes the joy out of it. It's a strategy game (in name at least), and I'd expect a sound strategy to be rewarded, and I'd expect careful planning and good decisions be the main deciding factor on whether a campaign plays out well or not. But not in Civ 6.

Now I can only talk for myself as rating the game goes, but one thing I can tell you is that I have about 100-150 steam friends who I used to game Civ5 MP with, and on any given day in 2019, over two years after Civ 6 release, there is usually more people on my steam playing V than VI.
 
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Hmmm, I could certainly see one's view of RNG heavily influencing opinions there, yeah. Personally I like a certain amount of RNG in my strategy games (although that's a very delicate balance to maintain, too much RNG with too little control or too few meaningful choices and you may as well just sit yourself in observer mode and not even play the game), because I feel like that actually makes it more strategic. Without RNG I feel like cookie-cutter strategies and tactics become much easier. It isn't so much trying to solve a problem as it is memorizing a formula; doing this and that in this or that order=win. I like it when something out of my control suddenly makes a winning strategy untenable, and you find yourself scrambling for a different approach. What entails a good strategy becomes situational, with multiple "if this then that, but if that then this" branching off from different possible outcomes.

EDIT: And I would also add that I didn't find VI stunningly great or anything, just that after IV my attitude towards Civ could be summed up with a resounding "meh", and I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it, even getting a little bit of that old "just one more turn" bug again.
 
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Just gonna add this here, apparently Paradox Tectonic has been exclusively hiring leads from big AAA projects and other hit games. Maybe Paradox is going AAA sooner than we thought!

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I think most gamers play consoles, and not computers. I actually prefer(red) console gaming myself and feel like computers are more for work. So while Paradox is popular on Steam, I think that represents a smaller section of the gaming market. [Mobile devices are maybe the most popular but that's not AAA.]
 
SirAlexius said:
Just gonna add this here, apparently Paradox Tectonic has been exclusively hiring leads from big AAA projects and other hit games. Maybe Paradox is going AAA sooner than we thought!

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Just because you recruit talent from the AAA Industry doesn't mean you're going AAA yourself.

As for MY definition of AAA?

There are two kinds of AAA. There is the Technical AAA, which can be measured in terms of Budget, and team size, etc.

Then there's the Cultural AAA, which is measured in brand recognition and the tactics employed by the publisher to make money (i.e. micro transactions, lootboxes insane pre-order options, poor treatment of employees, etc).

Paradox DEFINITELY doesn't meet the definition on the technical side or the cultural side, though you can see the beginning of some of those trends (the pre-order options for I:R; though they're hardly all that terrible, honestly).

Paradox CAN achieve the technical side of AAA (and I'm sure they will over the course of the next decade). However, they MUST avoid the cultural side because the cultural AAA is HIGHLY toxic and is gradually killing the brands that venture there.

How to avoid the Cultural Triple A? Avoid a sense of arrogance. That is the surest path to the dark side. Also being bought out by EA.

Fredrik Wester: I CAN'T WAIT TIL I GET BOUGHT BY EA!


The little fat kid is Fredrik Wester, by the way.

Anyway, where is PDX on the scale? What is the scale?

It goes:

Indie: The wonderful land where there's people who self-publish their games. There's no real size limit, per se, but usually, if you wanna get big you tend to have to get picked up by a publisher.

A: Mostly reserved for indie teams that get picked up by a publisher. There is danger here. Beware of unscrupulous publishers. And EA.

AA: Mostly just a more successful and entrenched A. Still incredibly dangerous. Beware of EA.

AAA: The above. There is money to be had, but beware everything. There is danger everywhere. Including becoming EA.

PDX is right around the middle to upper AA.
 
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