I’ve spent most of my career making big open-world RPGs in the AAA gaming market. But even while working in that side of the industry, I’ve always been looking longingly at the work coming out from smaller, indie developers.
That’s not to say I don’t love big games, mind you. There are things that big studios can do that smaller ones can’t, and vice versa. But I distinctly remember, during the development of Fallout 3, somewhere between the quest revisions and content cuts, I stumbled across Jason Rohrer’s solo game Passage (2007). And when I fired up this simple little five-minute game on my lunch break, I was moved to tears by it — both as an art experience that spoke to me and as an example of what an indie developer can do with very few resources.
So let’s talk about what a difference size makes in studios and how we define these size categories in modern games.
And to start, we need to address the terms “AAA” and “indie”. Because they really don’t mean anything anymore.
AAA as in “Big”
“Triple-A” is a term that comes from blockbuster movies and highly-rated investments, meaning the biggest and most lucrative options. And it absolutely applies to AAA games.
Although it feels ubiquitous now, it wasn’t really in use as a term until the ‘90s or so — before then, most games were pretty small teams (between 5 and 30 people) and the gaming market wasn’t nearly seen as so lucrative. But since games became a big business, we’ve seen the top tier of them grow massively in terms of team size.
And the “AAA” of the ‘90s looks nothing like the “AAA” of present. It all just means “as big as we can make it”.
(all of the following developer size measurements are based on the credit listings on mobygames.com, which is the closest our industry has for an IMDB equivalent. It’s imperfect, since it’s based on game’s credits, and the industry has no standard for crediting, but that’s an issue for a different time.)
System Shock (1994) — 65 developers
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) — 239 developers
Wasteland 2 (2014) — 449 developers
Elden Ring (2022) — 1,645 developers
Development budgets have ballooned in the AAA space, as well. While the data on that is harder to pin down — as studios are notoriously secretive with internal budgets — anecdotally I’ve heard the budgets for AAA games in ‘00 as being generally over $5 million, ‘10 as over $50 million, and now are well over $100 million at least.
And all of those numbers are before marketing and publishing costs, which tend to be about as much or more than the development cost for these titles games.
You can see why publishers are so risk-averse when it comes to trying new things in these AAA games. When you’ve got a many-millions on the line, you’re not going to take a risk on anything that hasn’t been proven in the market already.
On the other hand, there are some things that you can only really do at this scale of game development. It takes a large team to make the kind of huge, open-world games with multiple interlocking systems and hundreds of hours of content that players have come to expect in AAA games, to say nothing of the armies of artists required to meet ever-growing expectations of graphical realism and extravagance.
So today, if “AAA” just means “as big as we can make it”, what does it mean to go wildly over the top?
Bigger than Big
With Ubisoft’s launch of the long-delayed “Skull and Bones”, publisher head Yves Guillemot described it as “quadruple-A gaming”. And, looking at the credited list of developers and its incredible development time and cost, you can see why he’d want a new term for the sheer scope of investment in it:
Skull and Bones (2024) — 5,927 developers
While the “AAAA” title has been widely mocked in gaming circles, it’s not unreasonable to distinguish the sheer scale of the game versus the “mere couple thousands” of people involved in modern AAA gaming. But it’s not alone in those sorts of numbers:
Grand Theft Auto V (2013) (over ten years ago!) — 3,687 developers
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023) — 9,201 developers
This is the scale that can only be supported by being a generational tentpole for a major publisher. While Skull and Bones may have reached its size just by being in development hell for so long, the Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto games have been proven investments for decades now. Their publishers have just continued to feed their golden geese, and will continue to do so for as long as they’ll keep laying. Or until they get greedy and cut them open, perhaps (as you could argue Activision did with the Guitar Hero franchise).
These are franchises with budgets that are rumored to cost between $250M and $500M for development. Before marketing, of course. This is “economy of a small country” sized stuff.
So having a term for the absolute biggest of the big games is useful, even if it’s a silly one. It might even be appropriate that “AAAA” sounds like someone screaming at the mind-boggling size of it all.
Indie as in “Small”
On the other end of the spectrum of terms that mean nothing anymore is “indie”.
Once upon a time, “indie” stood for “independent”, as in a game made by a studio that wasn’t attached to a publisher. By necessity, that meant a smaller budget and leaner team, usually along with that certain degree of underground cred that only comes from something having no marketing budget and spreading by word of mouth. And it really wasn’t a term that came into use until the mid-’00s, largely in contrast to the “AAA” label and the explosive growth of that sector of the industry.
Now, the term “indie” has become as much a statement about a game’s vibe as it is about a game’s budget and studio size. “Indie” as a label is used to invoke a certain degree of experimentation, radicalism, auteurship, or retro fashion. Even some big publishers have found some success in scooping up their own “indie” studio or two to round out their portfolio of games.
Understandably, these smaller games tend to have certain advantages over the bigger budget games. Namely, it’s easier to have a unity of vision among small teams, and it’s safer to try out risky new types of gameplay when it’s a small investment. There’s also a lot more forgiveness for low production quality for a game labeled as indie — even though the economical and stylized choices made by indie developers can sometimes make a game feel much more timeless than games that strive for the ever-moving goalposts of ultrarealism.
That’s why it’s common to see “indie” games pave the way in developing a hot new sort of game (often with a coherent, auteur-ish vision), and then to see “AAA” games chase that trend and try to make a big-budget version of it for half a decade afterwards. Honestly, it’s a dynamic that I think big studios should embrace by holding in-house game jams among their devs, so they can experiment with their available tools and then pick and choose among the results for what to pursue in their full game.
So ultimately, “indie” is just a term that now means “on the smaller end of the game dev spectrum”. Where “smaller” usually means fewer than 100 devs and around a budget of $50 million or less.
But even it hasn’t been immune to the trend of studio inflation.
If we look at examples drawn from Steam’s listing of games released with the “indie” tag, we’ll find that results are all over the map, but generally trending upwards. Especially once you start counting all the “indie” releases that have the backing of major publishers.
Audiosurf (2008) — 10 developers
Hotline Miami (2012) — 71 developers
Inside (2016) — 51 developers
Hades (2020) — 170 developers (including about 55 “community contributors”)
Dave the Diver (2023) — 103 developers
Even famously small-team games like Super Hexagon (2012), Papers, Please (2013), Baba is You (2019), and Vampire Survivors (2021), which arguably have 5 or fewer core developers each, benefit from a huge pool of readily available tools and assets, as well as large audiences of crowdsourced playtesters (and fundraising backers who get to act as playtesters and guest designers). This is reflected as much higher numbers of developer roles listed on mobygames, but these are still generally the work of very small teams with development tools and asset libraries that magnify their productivity hugely.
Note to self: I should really sit down and do a proper scatterplot graph of all the indie game data, to see if there really is a significant trend in so-called indie games, where these numbers lie in relation to the growth of kickstarter and other crowdfunding sources, and what (if any) correlation can be found between team size, actual publisher support, and critical acclaim.
But that’ll have to be for a deeper article on the subject — this one is already far too large as it is.
Double-A — the Goldilocks Size?
So what happens with the games that are bigger than small, but smaller than big?
We’re seeing the rise of “AA” (or “double-A”) gaming as a kind of inbetween space between what gets called “indie” and what gets called “AAA”. It’s slowly being scoped out as a kind of budget point for mid-range genre titles and for arthouse games, like It Takes Two (2021), or Sayonara Wild Hearts (2019). You see a lot of these being pushed by specific publishers like Annapurna Interactive or Devolver Digital who are trying to find a place for themselves in the market, to fine success.
Personally, I’ve found a lot to love in this scale of games, and I’m eagerly watching its growth. There’s a more consistent embrace of each game having something to say, and a joy in experimental gameplay, both of which are what I really want to see in my games — both the games I play and the games I make.
I’d be fascinated to get more insight into this scale of game, and maybe I’ll have the fortune of working on such titles in the future. Watch this space, I suppose.
Micro and Solo Games
But despite this trend for constant inflation in game studios at any scale, there’s still no shortage of small games from singular creators. They’re just so small that they’re smaller than what gets called “indie”.
In addition to those indie games that actually come from tiny teams I mentioned above, you can look for the results of game jams, where small teams make microgames over the course of a weekend or month. Or look through the wealth of microgames on itch.io, where anyone can upload their game. If you’re not sure where to start, you can usually find a deal on a collection of thematically-related games on Humble Bundle.
Once you find an individual developer or group who speaks to you, you’ll be able to find more, both from them and from those who inspired them — just like discovering art from any artist you like.
For me, I’m delighted that Jason Rohrer is still making games on his own, like his solo-created civilization co-op MMO, One Hour One Life. It’s truly an inspiration to see what one developer can still do more or less on their own — particularly when they’ve had enough prior success to keep actively developing their own project for years.
The Right Size for the Right Game
So now that you know what each studio size term means (and doesn’t mean), it should be easier to see the broad bands of game sizes in the industry. And to see the ongoing trends in how expectations and a growing market have inflated these categories in some cases.
Whether you’re looking for a giant tentpole game in the “AAAA” space, or just want to curl up with the creation of a singular artist, the game industry has sought to fill a niche that suits your tastes — and it’s eagerly looking to create more niches.