The term AAA implies a sort of rating of quality, which is why it seems duplicitous to me.
It's a bit like the term "blockbuster" in film. Originally it meant a movie so good, lines to see it would go around the block. These days what it actually means is a huge-budget film filled with CG and spectacle, and studios labor under the belief that throwing that much money at a production will lead to blockbuster-scale ticket sales. Then they wonder why their "blockbusters" flop catastrophically at the actual box office.
It only implies a rating of quality because a large budget tends to imply high quality.
To give an example, no one calls Pillars of Eternity a AAA game despite it being raved over by gamers. The reason is simple. It didn't have an overly large budget, it had just a single artist.
People expect high quality to come from a big budget and that's completely reasonable (not duplicitous in any way). But the term still means a large budget. No one with much familiarity with the industry would argue otherwise.
I think the misunderstanding comes about from those who don't pay too much attention to the gaming industry as a whole misunderstanding the meaning because they guess at it via context and get it wrong. There is absolutely an implication of quality, but it is not a part of the definition of the term.
And exactly that point is the reason why I hate triple A games.
They are produced like movies. Throw insane amounts of money at an idea. More money, more insane things are possible.
But games don't actually _need_ lots of things, so much complexity or licenses for soccer teams/car brands. For me AAA games make no sense, and their economy makes even less sense.
I think there's a distinction to be made between complexity/expense of production and complexity/depth of gameplay. AAA games seem to be maximizing the former and minimizing the latter. The average single-player AAA experience is a two-to-ten-hour long series of cutscenes and linear gameplay areas, with the multiplayer more than likely some reskin of Counter-Strike. Or look at iterations of the same/similar games - Firaxis' AAA Civilization: Beyond Earth felt shallow and lifeless next to their inaugural almost-indie Alpha Centauri, despite BE's fully voice-acted and 3D-animated leaders and AC's mere static portraits.
Or for the ultimate in non-AAA gaming, Dwarf Fortress. Looks like Nethack, plays like AutoCAD, devours time like nothing else.
