On February 26, the rating aggregator Metacritic published two charts – a list of the best “large” and a list of the best “medium” game publishers. The tops were formed based on the press estimates of the companies’ games for 2017.
Large and not very
Bethesda was recognized as the best “major” publisher, which last year released a line of very highly appreciated projects by the press, including Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, The Evil Within 2 and Prey.
The first place among the “average” publishers belongs to Nicalis. She received such a high position thanks to the release on the Nintendo Switch of her library of games, including Cave Story+, The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ and The End Is Night. The top 3 “average” publishers also included Paradox Interactive and Devolver Digital.
Tops do not reflect the commercial success of companies in any way. Needless to say, sales of critically acclaimed Bethesda titles were not very high (by the company’s standards). For example, even after almost a year, Prey sales on Steam have still not reached a million copies.
However, the published charts are interesting as an indicator of the ability of publishers to work with the press, to get their location, including their projects.
Methodology
Metacritic divided the companies into “large” and “medium” based on the number of their unique releases on consoles and PCs. The list of “large” companies included only those that released twelve or more projects in 2017 (releases on different platforms were counted as one), the list of “medium” only those with at least six projects.
The division is very conditional, since the number of titles coming out, even among the giants of the market, differs from year to year due to the long development cycle of modern titles. Because of this division, for example, publishers such as Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive got into the list of “medium” companies.
When forming the charts themselves, Metacritic relied on a formula that takes into account four parameters:
- the average rating of all the company’s games released by the company for 2017 on the Metacritic website;
- percentage of evaluated projects with a good average rating (above 75%);
- percentage of evaluated projects with a poor average rating (below 49%);
- the number of “excellent” titles (the average score is 90% or higher, the game should have more than 7 reviews).
More information about the data can be found at this link.
A source: Metacritic