Before Skull & Bones hit the open market and promptly sunk to the depths, Ubisoft’s CEO, Yves Guillemot, stressed that the game’s price point was justified because it was a ‘AAAA game’. If you’re not familiar with the vernacular, an ‘AAA’ game is a classification used to signify a game with a big budget built by a major or mid-sized studio and backed by a top-tier publisher.
During a recent investor Q&A, CD Projekt’s Chief Financial Officer, Piotr Nielubowicz, had bold claims for the future of the firm and the games that the company is working on – all in jest, of course.
Better Than The Best
When quizzed about Ubisoft’s recent designation of Skull & Bones being a ‘AAAA’ game, Nielubowicz jokingly invented an all-new tier of gaming prestige. He was asked, ‘Do you dare to reassess whether CD Projekt will continue to produce ‘only’ AAA?’ To which he replied:
Ours will be AAAAA.
He may have been jesting with the interviewer, but it’s not far from being the truth. It was revealed that year that Cyberpunk 2077 was a drastically expensive game to both develop and fix. It cost CD Projekt a whopping $125 million to fix the game and pump it with new content after it was released – the firm spent $21 million alone in marketing for the Phantom Liberty expansion. That’s more than some developers spend on an entire game.
By the time CD Projekt was ready to move away from Cyberpunk 2077, almost half a billion dollars had been invested in the game. If budget alone is enough to make a game ‘AAAAA’, CDP came close to that designation with Cyberpunk 2077.
(Thanks to GamesRadar for tracking down the original quotes)
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