Publishers: Intro & ESRB Summary - Part One

As we did with the developer summary, the publisher detail will be in three parts. For reference, the counts shown in the following tables reflect game titles for which Metacritic had a score associated. Metacritic requires that each title have at least four media reviews before a score is assigned. For more details, please view our platform summary.

The publisher data in the next few sections is somewhat normalized.  Publishers are often noted differently depending of branch, region, or if they were in a partnership with another party.  For example, “Sega” and “Sega Europe” are all represented as “Sega.”  We also consolidated the various 2K properties, but did not rollup Rockstar under the 2k umbrella. 

The green highlighted areas you’ll see represent the highest values for a column, and the orange highlight for the lowest. For example, the Top 10 Publisher list below notes that Electronic Arts had the highest number of titles, Sony with the best Metacritic Scores, and Activision with worst score.  The “Worst” scores are not the overall “worst”, yet just the lowest score in the table and/or column.

Now we’ll take the top publishers see how their scores are distributed in Metacritics Favorability Index.

The table below illustrates the percentage distribution of games scored that fall within simple “positive”, “negative”, and “nuetral” categories.  This should be helpful to identify basic quality performance.

The following are the top developers who scored the most titles falling into the favorability category “Universal Acclaim.”

This next table is a summary of highest Metacritic Scores and the associated publishers.

Next we’ll take a look at a series of tables related to the appropriate ESRB and see who publishes the most games per category as well as the best rated games.  Note that the scores for best, worst, as well as the averages are a subset of that particular ESRB category.  These scores may not reflect that publishers overall best, worst, etc.  For example, the Average Rating, is actually the average for that publisher in the noted ESRB category.