AAA - big budget for both development and marketing; these usually make news headlines, regardless of quality, and most people hear of them
AA - usually focus on some niche with a moderate to high dev budget and moderate marketing budget; so something like Paradox or perhaps Double Fine (before MSFT acquisition)
indie - low budget games, usually through “bootstrapping”; some of these make headlines, but those are outliers
Publishing is a separate discussion entirely. Some AAA games are self published, some use a separate publisher. Same goes for indies and AA games. I think it’s a lot less likely that indies will self publish because they just don’t have the skillset to market a game.
I mostly buy indie and AA games because they tend to need to focus on some core game loop and can’t just throw the kitchen sink in like AAAs often can.
Worms games developer and are now a publisher that published a bunch of known indie games like Dredge, Blasphemous, Trepang2 etc…
Honest question: are those really indie games if they have a publisher?
Indie makes reference to an independent developer that is often self funded irregardless of how the final game is distributed.
Yes.
In general:
Publishing is a separate discussion entirely. Some AAA games are self published, some use a separate publisher. Same goes for indies and AA games. I think it’s a lot less likely that indies will self publish because they just don’t have the skillset to market a game.
I mostly buy indie and AA games because they tend to need to focus on some core game loop and can’t just throw the kitchen sink in like AAAs often can.