Metacritic is mainly known for assigning ratings to games, movies, and music through aggregated reviews. However, once a year, game publishers are also featured, and we show you the latest list on MeinMMO.
What is this list about:
- Once a year, the website “Metacritic” publishes a ranking of game publishers
- The site takes all published games from a publisher in one year and allocates points based on the achieved meta score
- For 2021, Microsoft is in 1st place and the indie publisher “Humble Games” is in 3rd place
Publisher Ranking – Humble Games overtakes the “big ones”
What kind of list is this? Metacritic creates aggregated ratings from reviews and can often provide a differentiated first impression of a game.
From these game ratings, the website has now created a ranking of the publishers responsible for the respective titles. A total of 43 publishers are represented.
What do the top 10 look like? The best 10 read like a “Who’s Who” of gaming publishers.
But in between, there is a small surprise that jumped from 18th to 3rd place and puts industry giants like Activision Blizzard or Bethesda in their place: Humble Games.
Top 10 Publisher Ranking Metacritic 2022
- Microsoft / Xbox Game Studios – 87.4
- Sony – 81.3
- Humble Games – 80.9
- Activision Blizzard – 80.6
- Bethesda Softworks – 80.2
- Capcom – 80.6
- Bandai Namco – 78.5
- Sega – 77.6
- Electronic Arts – 78.3
- 505 Games – 75.7
In 1st place is Microsoft and Xbox Game Studios, who, with a good margin, became the first publisher to reach over 85 points. Last year, Microsoft was in 6th place.
In 2nd place is competitor Sony. The PlayStation makers are falling behind Microsoft – last year they were in 4th place ahead of Microsoft.
In 3rd place is the indie publisher Humble Games. This is the publishing arm of the gaming company “Humble Bundle”, which sells the titular game bundles. The games usually start with a low budget.
A large slideshow of the 43 publishers with a brief overview of the successes in 2021 can be found on the English website of Metacritic (via metacritic.com).
How was the list created? To create the ranking, the Metacritic points of the individual games were not simply taken but were incorporated into a point system:
- Average metacritic score x 1.5
- Maximum of 150 points possible
- %-value of games that had a minimum of 75 metacritic score
- e.g. 80 % = + 80 points / 100 points possible
- 100 minus the %-value of games that had a score below 49
- e.g. 20 % = 100 – 20 = 80 points / 100 points possible
- 5 bonus points for games over 90 metacritic score (minimum 7 reviews)
Furthermore, only publishers with at least 5 games released in 2021 that were considered in the Metacritic rankings were included in the list.
An interesting ranking that shows that good games do not necessarily need a large budget to convince players and press.
On MeinMMO we have a big indie fan in the editorial team: our author Marko Jevtic. If you want to check out some indie gems that he guarantees are worth playing, take a look here: The 10 best single-player shooters under 20 € that you can play in 2022.
