Metacritic’s highest ranked video game publisher of 2020 is… Sega?!

The 11th annual Metacritic publisher rankings have revealed the most critically successful publishers of 2020 and it’s not who you think.

The combination of a global pandemic and the switchover between one generation and the next meant that 2020 never had a chance to become a classic year for video game releases.

2021 is even worse though because at least last year saw the launch of games that were almost finished before the pandemic started, whereas now more of a game’s development has had to be completed while working from home.

That means 2020 did have some important classics, as celebrated in our top 20 of the year and the reader’s top 20, as well as the new Metacritic rankings for publishers, which given the peculiarities of last year has thrown up some very surprising results.

The rankings are calculated according to critic reviews only (including our own) and use four factors to determine the rankings: the average Metascore for all games released in 2020, the percentage of scored games that get over 75%, the percentage of scored games with a score lower than 49%, and the number of games scoring over 90%.

The average Metascore is weighted to be the most important part of the calculation, with the others used to try and establish publishers that are the most consistent. The full list of 48 separate publishers is here but you can see the top 10 below.

Clearly, indie publishers did very well, with No More Robots owing its position to ports of existing games like Hypnospace Outlaw, while Annapurna has been excellent for a long time and the only publisher in the list where all the games got a green ‘good’ ranking from Metacritic – even if, again, a lot of them were just new ports of earlier titles.

The highest ranked console manufacturer was Sony, with Microsoft doing much better than usual primarily thanks to Microsoft Flight Simulator. Nintendo though did unusually poorly, all the way down at number nine. That’s primarily because they hardly released any games at all last year, although they still didn’t publish anything that got a ‘bad’ Metacritic rating.

Other than the number one spot, Capcom and Activision Blizzard were the only traditional AAA multiformat publishers to make the top 10, with Square Enix at number 11, Ubisoft at number 14, and Bethesda – who Microsoft recently bought for $7.5 billion – at number 16.

The big shock though is Sega at number one, given many might struggle to remember them releasing any games at all. However, Sega also owns Atlus and it’s their games, and the proliferation of Yakuza, Bayonetta, and Two Point Hospital ports that gave the publisher a boost.

Sega earned an average Metascore of 81.6%, with two games rated ‘great’ (Persona 5 Royal and Yakuza 0 on Xbox), and 95% of all titles rated as ‘good’.

The lowest ranked publisher was Polish firm Ultimate Games, whose games include *checks notes* Robot Squad Simulator X and Wanking Simulator.

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