mainly i want to focus on one detail in the article that i found pretty revealing. it's this:
The term "AAA" began to be used in the late 1990s, when a few development companies started using the expression at gaming conventions in the US. The term was borrowed from the credit industry's bond ratings, where "AAA" bonds represented the safest opportunity most likely to meet their financial goals.
so let's talk about bond credit ratings.
let's say i have little contractually-binding slips of paper that say "xeph will give the owner of this slip of paper $11 on november 29, 2023". this is a xeph bond. you can buy these from me for $10 each if you want1. you might be suspicious that i won't have $11 on november 29, 2023, though, so you'll take it to a credit rating bureau. their job is to look me up and down and decide how likely i am to have $11 to give you on that date. they'll analyze me and give the slip of paper a grade based on how good i am for it. the highest rating (typically given to, for example, stable governments that can simply print the promise money) is AAA. if you put your buy a slip of paper rated AAA, the credit rating guys claim, it would take a truly apocalyptic scenario to not get the promised money on the date given.
this incentivizes a particular behavior though. if you know for sure you'll get $11 in a year for every $10 you give me now, maybe you want a lot. maybe you want millions of slips of paper. with good return practically guaranteed, you'd pump as much money as you could get your hands on to buy my bonds, if it was the best return you could get. sky's the limit really. (not financial advice lol)
the games businessguys at e3 in the 90s who popularized this AAA terminology were speaking in that language. they're saying: hey, if you give money to develop final fantasy 7, it is practically guaranteed you'll get your money back and then some once we finish it and sell it. put as much money into it as possible. in the clothing of finance, the video game budgets ballooned up into the stratosphere. the finance guys are looking at a game with a 50 million dollar budget through the lens of "i will pay 50 million now and get 55 million when the game is done. this is a guaranteed (AAA) return". i mean, it's not like an agency came and rated it as that, but that was the pitch that big publishers were making to potential investors. nobody was really saying "a game that costs 50 million dollars to make is 20% better than a game that costs 40 million dollars to make" even though that was the underlying implication there. it's a dump stat but for money.
coming from video games, the connotation of "AAA" for me was always more in the realm of like "large teams, large budget, lots of features and systems and polish". later in life when i started learning about finance, i noticed this little nugget on wikipedia and went wow, that doesn't line up with what "AAA video game" is in my head, but i can totally see how it got there from the other side: the certainty of consumer sales at the end begets the large budget from investors piling in money for low-risk returns, the large budget begets the the big team and somewhat extended dev cycle, which begets the extra polish and fidelity and such. just a total inversion of the dependency order i had in my head, but since both the game side and the finance side agree on all the elements being there, they don't have to resolve which side comes first
1 for pretend. i do not sell anything. do not ask me to buy bonds