Take-Two Leads Metacritic's 2010 Game Publisher Rankings

Author: by Staff

Reviews aggregator Metacritic has released a list of the video game publishers with the highest-quality games during 2010, and found that Take-Two had the best overall ranking of the year. To avoid stacking major publishers with many releases up against smaller companies who'd launched few games, the company divided publishers into two groups based on whether or not they had released more than 15 unique titles in the year. Then, Metacritic took the average Metascore for all the company's 2010 games and then considered the percentage of a company's games with a score of at least 75 versus those with a score of 90 or higher ("great" scores) and those with bad reviews (49 percent or lower).The average for all a company's products was weighted "slightly more" than the other factors. Take-Two released Red Dead Redemption, which was a critical darling with a score of 95 and won gamers' hearts with an average 8.8 user score. The company's Rockstar studio had a higher average for its 10 scored 2010 titles with 82.1. Overall, Take-Two's portfolio averaged a Metascore of 77.1. Its worst title was MLB 2K10, which scored 52 -- still an average score. By Metacritic's ranking, Take-Two didn't release one poorly-reviewed game in all of 2010. Nintendo was quite close behind in second place; its overall average Metascore was 76.1, with its highest-rated game being Super Mario Galaxy 2. The title had an impressive 97 score, but Nintendo published one "poor" title, AquaSpace, along with the highest number of unscored reviews -- releases of little interest to the press. Capcom, Microsoft and Electronic Arts were the third, fourth and fifth-ranked publishers in the report, which is available to view in full detail on Metacritic's website.