These are not quality levels on a single scale. They are different requirements, and an asset can comfortably pass one while failing another.
Game-ready is about budget and behaviour in an engine: a face count the target platform can carry, sane UVs, correct scale and orientation, and a mesh that will not fall apart when it is skinned. A face ceiling is enforced rather than suggested.
Print-ready is about physical reality: watertight, manifold, no inverted normals, wall thickness that survives the process, and no floating geometry a slicer will silently drop. A beautiful game asset is frequently not printable — hollow shells and one-sided surfaces are perfectly normal in a game and useless on a printer.
DCC-editable is about what happens when a human opens it: topology that can be selected, edited and re-UV'd without fighting it. A dense generated mesh can look excellent and be miserable to edit.
Choose the tier for the job you actually have. The pipeline checks against the tier you picked, so picking the wrong one means being refused for the wrong reasons — or worse, passing a bar you did not need.
- Game-ready: budget, UVs, scale, skinnability.
- Print-ready: watertight, manifold, wall thickness.
- DCC-editable: topology a human can work with.