A familiar refrain in recent years has been the death of what we like to call the AA games: the mid-budget matches produced by medium-sized teams. AA games have production values comparable to AAA blockbusters – You know: a full voice game, cinematographic cinematics, sophisticated 3D graphics – and occupy similar genres, but tend to have a more modest scope and a set of realistic ambitions. They were previously the stocks of the industry, until they were in a hurry by an independent scene which explodes on one side and that the publishers opposed to the risk are focused on safe bets on the other. Now they are an endangered species.
An article on the game forum, Ratuma, recently alerted me with something interesting. The two best evaluated games of 2025 so far (alongside the independent darling Blue prince) – and the two main forefronts for Game of the Year at the Game Awards in December – are Clear obscure: shipping 33 And Divided fiction. These are both sold for $ 50 – not the standard of the $ 60 industry or the increasingly widespread higher price of $ 70 (regardless of Nintendo’s decision to break the taboo of $ 80 with Mario Kart World). The poster formulated this as a fair price triumph on greed and the bloating of AAA games.
Personally, I am wary of building critical arguments around prices and value – especially because paying more for our games is undoubtedly necessary, although painful, on the contribution if the game industry must survive inflation, arrow the development costs and by wedging the growth of the game public.
But it is also true that the acceptance of more expensive games that take even more time to do is not the only way to sustainability for games. Alternatively, we could reframe our expectations for the scope and technical specifications of the games we play, and the quantity of work that does them. As the same says: “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are more paid to work less and I am not kidding.”
It looks like a description of an AA game for me. Well, perhaps not the “paid more to work less” part – certainly not at the peak of the 2000s in the category – but even it could have room to change as new models of publishing and emerging development.
Consider Clear And Divided fiction. Neither can be called an independent game, but they are both made on the outskirts of the traditional publishing system. Clear is the first game of Sandfall Interactive, an independent French studio founded by Ubisoft Veterans. He has a team of around 30 people, supported by external entrepreneurs. The game was funded and published by Kepler Interactive, a young hungry publisher who was himself founded by an independent studios coalition.
Divided fiction is more of a release of establishment, but only in a way. He was funded by giant electronic arts in the industry. But its Swedish developer Hazelight (team size: around 80 years) is entirely independent and like the previous games of Hazelight, Divided fiction was published under the EA Originals label in a relationship of length of arms which gives the developer a complete creative control. I do not know what working conditions at Sandfall and Hazelight, but I would not be surprised if they were better than the standard of industry.
This is something that distinguishes these two versions from AA games in the past. Another is their critical reception. AA classics of the past – games like Second sight,, GripOr The darkness – were good, but rarely considered large in their time. They were pleasantly luscious kind efforts that remained mainly in their ways, and were slowly penalized by criticism for their lack of ambition.
Clear And Divided fictionHowever, both appreciated the universal praise, reflected in more than 90 notes on metacritics and opencritics. Revision scores like these are generally reserved for AAA superproductions, expensive vanity projects and revolutionary Indies. (And the Nintendo games, which no doubt adapt often the AA model, but it is an argument for another time.) It is very unusual for half-budget productions like these resonate with criticism in this way-although perhaps a little less unusual over time. You can say that last year Metaphor: refantazio belongs to this category, and even in 2023 Goty Winner Baldur’s Gate 3.
The two new games succeed for various reasons. Divided fiction is focused on laser on a gameplay style – cooperative games with a shared screen for two players – which is very popular, but poorly served by industry. (Hazelight’s previous game, He takes twosold 20 million amazing copies.) Divided fiction stands out just by performing this rare breed of play very well. Clear Remurère an AAA genre of the past – basically, the Final Fantasy Games based on the turn of the 2000s – with a more modest scope and a strongly individual flavor in its writing and its works of art. He feels both nostalgic and fresh.
But, more broadly, games have something in common. Without give by the need to be enormous, or to please the widest possible public, they are both able to give players something specific they want and that the traditional game industry does not give them. And they do it in a vernacular language which seems almost indistinguishable from an AAA version on blood. This is why they resonate so strongly with criticism and players.
In the current crisis in the sustainability of the game industry, it is encouraging that AA games have a moment and gain respectability that they have never appreciated before. If Divided fiction Or Clear is the crowned game of the year at Game Awards in December – which, after Grand Theft Auto 6The delay is quite possible, perhaps even probably – we will know with certainty that the AA return finally occurs.
