Gunstar Green wrote:While it may not cost as much to make Skyward Sword as The Last of Us it's certainly AAA title as far as the industry is concerned.
It's a flagship title from a first party company released on what was at the time their flagship hardware with a large marketing campaign that was highly advertised and anticipated by the mainstream as well as expected to be a best-seller months before it was even out the door.
What the budget was is kind of irrelevant.
But it's not irrelevant to the topic at hand. Mario and Zelda are the kind of games that the industry needs. Games built on a smaller controlled budget, but of high quality.
But most 3rd party publishers prefer to chase the "blockbuster" model, meaning they put a lot of money in "me too" products. Think about it, Battlefield, which started as an exclusively multiplayer series, for some reason needs a single player story option. Why? Cause other blockbuster games have it too. Think of how many sandboxes games there have been in the past generation, who didn't know what to do with a sandbox, just so they could copy GTA.
The problem seems to be that people are confused about what triple A means. Is it a sign of quality or budget? Clearly the industry itself thinks it's about budget, cause I've seen many "triple A" releases which are in reality sub-par games, while I've seen many amazing handheld or indie releases that no one in the gaming press would call triple A.