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Several people (myself included) have been throwing around the terms "AAA" and "Indie" pretty loosely. And I just came to the realization that I may not have the expertise to clearly to be able to easily bucket games. I'm appealing to the experts on D1P to help me! AAA Games I remember hearing this term in the mid-90s for the first time, and it clearly referred to big budget games that had large development budgets, and attracted significant marketing budgets. These are games like CoD, Madden, Battlefront, God of War. (Tangent: I recall, initially, anything not being "AAA" as being a "B" game -- I also remember the term "AA" being thrown around in the early oughts as well to classify smaller games.) Indie Games Indie games are games that are self funded by a developer, and typically developed outside of a major-publishing relationship. Questions I Have 1. Can a game be both AAA and Indie at the same time? (i.e. Cyberpunk 2077 which is a huge budget game, which is not being funded by a publisher) 2. Can a game move from being an Indie game to a AAA game later? (i.e. Minecraft which was developed an released by one person, but is now published by Microsoft) 3. Can a game be neither AAA or Indie? (i.e. A Way Out -- which was published by EA, but had a very low Budget) 4. Can a game have a publisher and still be Indie? (i.e. if it's published by Devolver Digital, it is Indie? How about Koei Tecmo? Atlus?) 5. Can a development studio make both AAA and Indie games? (i.e. Ninja Theory made DMC for publisher Capcom, and then developed and self-published Hellblade with a team of 15-20 people) 6. Should there be a different way of classifying games beyond just these two terms? If so, what are they? I need to be able to classify my games!