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For years, we've been living under an illusion. An illusion which tells us quality games need huge dev teams, massive budgets, and rising prices in order to be successful. This illusion, though, has begun to falter in recent years. It was crafted by big, corporate AAA game studios, but the rise of incredibly talented AA studios have begun to tear at its loose threads, making it unravel.

The first cut came with the release of Baldur's Gate 3 by Larian Studios. Larian has a well deserved reputation. Divinity Original Sin 2 was a great game, but Baldur's Gate 3 took those ideas and perfected them. It is a game that never plays the same way twice, giving it near infinite replayability. AAA studio execs were very quick to try and convince us this game didn't represent a new standard, a new high bar for AAA games. 

When From Software released Elden Ring, the response from AAA studio execs and developers was outrage. The game broke all the rules of the AAA industry. It didn't push graphical fidelity, didn't reinvent the wheel gameplay wise, yet it was far more successful than bigger budget AAA games out at the time. From Software is an AAA studio which operates like an AA. They made Elden Ring on a budget of $100 million, which is small in the AAA industry, with a small dev team of just 350 people. 

There have been others, but none have ripped holes in the AAA illusion like Sandfall Interactive's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. A tiny French dev team of 33 people on a tiny budget of a mere $1.7 million developed a game which embarrassed an entire industry. We were told nobody wanted turn-based RPGs anymore. Yet, here we have a turn-based RPG that outsold games from two of the largest AAA franchises in recent memory; Assassin's Creed and Dragon Age. 

Expedition 33 dared to break all the rules. Turn-based RPG weren't supposed to be popular anymore. Games on tiny budgets weren't supposed to have beautiful visuals. Games with small dev teams weren't supposed to have great gameplay and mature, well written storytelling. The saddest part of this whole thing is games like Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, and Expedition 33 used to be the kinds of games you'd expect from AAA studios, but that's not true anymore. 

Their need to meet corporate financial targets isn't compatible with taking risks on new, innovative game ideas and genre redefining projects. A paradigm shift is happening, where AAA no longer holds the same meaning it once had. Today, AAA stands for live services, exploitative microtransactions, and never-ending sequels. A new breed of game studio is rising. They're far more nimble and capable of taking risks on new ideas, and the democratization of technology has given them the tools normally reserved to big corporate studios.

The era of the AA studio has arrived.