AAA Game Development: A Glossary

This is part of Motherboard's feature about the development of Gears of War 4. Follow along here.

The world of AAA game development is a mess of jargon from a variety of disciplines: software development, game design, business, public relations, and more.

This is a guide to some of the terms Motherboard used throughout our feature "Making a Big Budget Video Game Is Riskier and Harder Than Ever. So Why Do It?" in which we embedded with the development team behind Gears of War 4.

AAA game

Video games with the biggest development and marketing budgets in the industry. To be frank, "AAA" is not a great term because it sounds like a marketing term, implying that the game is of the highest quality, whatever that may be. Many games that cost a lot of money suck. In this story and in all instances the term "AAA" is used on Motherboard, it is shorthand for "a very expensive game on consoles or PCs that is using the latest and greatest technology and—the video game equivalent of a big, summer blockbuster movie."

Bug

A technical flaw in the build in any respect: sound, code, level design, etc.

Build

A complete or near complete version of software.

Cert

Certification. Each of the three console manufacturers—Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony—has a different certification process, meaning the company will test a developer's game to make sure it meets the platform's standards before it's published there. Usually this process takes two weeks.

Going Gold

If a game passes certification, it has "gone gold," meaning it's ready to be pressed on disc and shipped to stores or distributed digitally. The origin of the term isn't clear. Some say that it refers to the "gold masters," which are gold-based CD-Rs that don't degrade as quickly as other, cheaper CD-Rs. Others say it refers to the "golden master," on any format, that is duplicated to make more copies. Still others say that it comes from the music industry, where The Recording Industry Association of America awards a golden record to an artist who sells 500,000 units. Either way, the term always means that the game is ready for launch.

Jira

Workflow software The Coalition uses to track and address bugs.

QA

"Quality assurance." The division at The Coalition that tests Gears 4 and makes sure it meets the developer's standards.

RC

"Release candidate." A build of the game that a development team would consider sending to cert after testing. The first release candidate is named RC0 or RCLOL because there's no real chance it will come back from testing without finding more bugs. Subsequent RCs are labeled RC1, RC2, RC3, etc. An RC that "holds" through testing, meaning comes back with no new bugs or fixes that didn't work, will be sent to cert.

Repro

When QA testers find a bug, they will attempt to identify a reliable series of steps to reproduce it, which will help the triage team figure out what caused the bug and how to fix it.

RTM

"Release to manufacturing." The final build of the game that's on the disc, the one that has "gone gold."

Triage

The Coalition will have several "triage" meetings a day. These meetings include key staff from each division (art, tech, multiplayer, etc), who will decide if a bug is low priority or high priority and how to fix it.

Wnf

"Will not fix." This is how you would label a low priority bug that you don't plan to fix because it's too risky or not a smart use of resources. These bugs are sometimes known as "KS," meaning known, shippable bugs.

ZBR

"Zero bug release," the first build of the game with no known major bugs (excluding those labeled wnf).

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