A familiar refrain over the last few years has been the death of what we like to call AA games: mid-budget games made by mid-sized teams. AA games have production values that are comparable with AAA blockbusters — you know: full voice acting, cinematic cutscenes, fancy 3D graphics — and occupy similar genres, but tend to have a more modest scope and realistic set of ambitions. They used to be the industry’s stock-in-trade, until they were squeezed out by an exploding indie scene on one side and risk-averse publishers’ focus on mega-budget sure bets on the other. Now they’re an endangered species.
A post on the gaming forum ResetEra recently alerted me to something interesting. The two best-reviewed games of 2025 so far (alongside the indie darling Blue Prince) – and the two leading front-runners for Game of the Year at The Game Awards in December — are Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Split Fiction. These both retail for $50 — not the industry-standard $60 or the increasingly widespread premium price point of $70 (never mind Nintendo’s decision to break the $80 taboo with Mario Kart World). The poster framed this as a triumph of fair pricing over the greed and bloat of AAA gaming.
Personally, I’m wary of constructing critical arguments around pricing and value — not least because paying more for our games is an arguably necessary, if painful, counter-measure if the game industry is to survive inflation, skyrocketing development costs, and stalling growth in the gaming audience.
But it’s also true that accepting more expensive games that take even longer to make isn’t the only path to sustainability for gaming. Alternatively, we could reframe our expectations for the scope and technical specifications of the games we play, and the sheer amount of labor that goes into making them. As the meme puts it: “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.”
That sounds like a description of a AA game to me. Well, maybe not the “paid more to work less” part — certainly not in the category’s 2000s heyday — but even this might have room to change as new publishing and development models emerge.
Consider Clair Obscur and Split Fiction. Neither can really be called an indie game, but they’re both made on the outskirts of the traditional publishing system. Clair Obscur is the debut game of Sandfall Interactive, an independent French studio founded by Ubisoft veterans. It has a team of about 30 people, supported by outside contractors. The game was funded and released by Kepler Interactive, a young, hungry publisher that was itself founded by a coalition of indie studios.
Split Fiction is more of an establishment release, but only kind of. It was bankrolled by industry giant Electronic Arts. But its Swedish developer Hazelight (team size: around 80) is fully independent, and like Hazelight’s previous games, Split Fiction was published under the EA Originals label in an arms-length relationship that gives the developer full creative control. I don’t know what the working conditions are like at Sandfall and Hazelight, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were better than the industry norm.
That’s one thing that sets these two releases apart from the AA games of old. Another is their critical reception. The AA classics of the past — games like Second Sight, Stranglehold, or The Darkness — were good, but seldom considered great in their time. They were enjoyably pulpy genre efforts that mostly stayed in their lanes, and were gently penalised by reviewers for their lack of ambition.
Clair Obscur and Split Fiction, however, have both enjoyed universal acclaim, reflected in 90-plus ratings on both Metacritic and Opencritic. Review scores like these are usually reserved for AAA blockbusters, expensive first-party vanity projects, and mold-breaking indies. (And Nintendo games, which arguably often fit the AA template, but that’s an argument for another time.) It’s very unusual for mid-budget productions like these to resonate with reviewers in this way — although perhaps a bit less unusual as time goes on. You can argue that last year’s acclaimed Metaphor: ReFantazio belongs in this category, and even 2023 GOTY winner Baldur’s Gate 3.
The two new games succeed for different reasons. Split Fiction is laser-focused on a style of gameplay – split-screen, co-operative gaming for two players – that’s very popular, but underserved by the industry. (Hazelight’s previous game, It Takes Two, has sold an astonishing 20 million copies.) Split Fiction stands out just by executing this rare breed of game very well. Clair Obscur resurrects a AAA genre of the past — basically, the turn-based Final Fantasy games of the 2000s — with a more modest scope and a strongly individual flavor in its writing and artwork. It feels both nostalgic and fresh.
But, more broadly, the games do have something in common. Unencumbered by the need to be huge, or to appeal to the widest possible audience, they’re both able to give players something specific that they crave and that the mainstream gaming industry isn’t giving them. And they do so in a gaming vernacular that looks almost indistinguishable from a full-blooded AAA release. That’s why they’re resonating so strongly with critics and players.
In the game industry’s current crisis of sustainability, it’s heartening that AA games are having a moment and earning a respectability that they’ve never enjoyed before. If Split Fiction or Clair Obscur is crowned Game of the Year at The Game Awards in December — which, following Grand Theft Auto 6’s delay, is quite possible, perhaps even likely — we’ll know for sure that the AA comeback is happening at last.
