Games, when it comes to gaming development over the years, fall into three categories. You have your smaller-budget titles that fall into indie, your bigger-yet-not-gigantic budget projects such as double-A, and then you of course have your system-selling, console-exclusive, massive multi-million-budget games known as triple-A.

And for years now, these labels for games have really been seen as just the three standards; however, what if a new label was set to soon be a real thing, and we are, of course, talking about Quadruple A?

Why are we talking about this?

You see, you may be questioning right now what even is quadruple A? Why are we over here at Inviox even talking about it? And what would a quadruple A even look like?

Now to tackle the 'Why are we at Inviox talking about it?' question first, it's fairly simple. You see, for years now, Quadruple A has actually been a bit of a joke in the gaming industry.

After a certain game developer CEO claimed that their game was "going to be the first quadruple A game on the market", and whilst it certainly wasn't and many laughed, we here at Inviox had the interesting thought of what actually a quadruple A game would look like and how, actually, after some deep research, quadruple A may not actually be as far-fetched as it seems.

How and why would Quadruple A even exist?

Now, to start with, how and why would Quadruple A even exist? You see, for years now, this will shock no one in saying gaming development costs and production lengths have been drastically increasing for AAA.

Triple A games seemingly overnight have gone from millions of pounds and a few years to make to hundreds of millions and well damn near decades to finish.

'Triple A' now can vastly mean very different budgets; a 'Triple A' game can simply just mean a 50 million pound game, but then the next 'Triple A' game can cost, say, over 200 million to make.

And this brings us to a point many comment on, and that is just exactly what classifies as a triple-A game budget-wise anymore?

There are AAA games with the budget of 30-50 million, and there are some with 300 million at the very least, and so with this sort of undefined line of AAA, maybe we will see video games start to have a quadruple A category because can you say that a 40 million AAA game is the same budget-wise as a 300 million?

What would a quadruple game look like?

Now onto the more theoretical but arguably most interesting side of this topic, which is actually just asking, "What the heck would a quadruple A game even look like?" And that is not only a great question, but we here at Inviox think we have a pretty good idea.

You see, to tackle this idea, we have to look at it from two angles: the gaming development side and, well, just straight up what the finished game would be! So to start with, we here at Inviox know all too well the gaming development side of things.

Gaming development, you see, has come a drastically long way since the early days of Pong. However, whilst the gaming industry has made great strides and gone to great lengths, the increase of costs has also followed in the same pursuit.

We mentioned this earlier in the article; however, one aspect we have left out is that with the gaming industry constantly growing and with more and more people getting into the medium and more and more games getting made, we have seen a lot of developers take massive financial swings in the hundreds of millions, but we have yet to see a developer swing into a new category.

And that swing, of course, is talking about a game or games which get into the billions of development costs.

You see, it really isn't that insane to think that, say, in a decade or, being generous, a few decades, a game will cost a billion to make, and if you ask us, that would arguably be the first proper quadruple-A game from a cost standpoint. Because how could you say a AAA game which costs, say, something like 100 million is the same as a game which costs A BILLION!!!

And then finally, what even would a quadruple-A game look like? Firstly, to answer this question, we are going to pick a game that is already released for this quadruple-A game so we can expand the idea further and really explore the idea properly.

Let's take, say, a game like GTA V for example; whilst a technical marvel and absolute masterpiece, there were limitations with this game because of the time it came out and, of course, budget.

Now a quadruple-A GTA V would look very different from the GTA V we know today. Firstly, every building would have to be enterable and filled uniquely. NPCs would act differently and all behave differently. Guns would have their own distinct and unique mechanics; there would be a myriad of things to do with said guns and not just shooting. Environments would have to be so detailed that the detail in Red Dead Redemption 2 would look bad.

You see a quadruple A game would all come down to the attention to detail and not just the major aspects; NPCs wouldn't just have sleep schedules and routines, but they would almost have to have their own ways of life and day-to-day tasks like the player in said game would, and really there would have to be so much detail in a quadruple A game in which the player base may never and probably wouldn't ever be able to find all of the lesser, more major details.

Could Quadruple A be the future?

Now some closing thoughts before we go: a final question would be could Quadruple A actually be the future for gaming? and whilst it definitely could be a huge factor, the gaming games of this cost and magnitude just simply couldn't be sustainable.

I mean, not only the costs, but imagine how long a game of this magnitude would take to make; however, that is not to say that we don't think a quadruple-A game or games will exist – they just won't be a common occurrence.

But hey, with how gaming development is changing and always rapidly evolving, who's to say that they can't, huh?