Nintendo Places In “Top 10” Of Metacritic’s 14th Annual Game Publisher Rankings

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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Image: Nintendo

Metacritic released its 14th annual publisher rankings earlier this week and Nintendo has placed in the top 10 for 2023.

Thanks to the critical success of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and some other titles, Nintendo placed sixth place out of 46 publishers on the list. It had an average Metascore of 79.5 in 2023 after releasing 22 titles, with four great games overall. In the previous year, it was 12th. Here’s what Metacritic had to say about its latest result:

“Placing yet again in our top 10, Nintendo released more titles than any other publisher on this year’s list. But despite the fact that four of those titles scored 90 or higher—easily the best among all publishers this year—Nintendo was prevented from ranking even higher by its relatively low 73% success rate, which was the lowest among all publishers cracking our top 10.”

Previous year’s rank: 12 (of 45)
Average Metascore: 79.5
22 products (22 titles): 73% good, 0% bad
“Great” games: 4
Best 2023 game: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (NS) 96

Capcom (Resident Evil 4) was in the top spot, followed by Raw Fury (Cassette Beasts) and Chorus Worldwide (A Space for the Unbound). Sega (Persona 4 Golden) was in the ninth spot, Sony (Marvel’s Spider-Man 2) was in 13th place and Microsoft (Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition) was in 15th.

EA (Dead Space) was tied with Team17 (Blasphemous 2) in 16th, Square Enix (Star Ocean: The Second Story R) was in the 19th spot, Ubisoft (Anno 1800 Console Edition) was 23rd, and Bandai Namco (Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon) was 27th on the list.

Here’s the full list of top 10 publishers:

  1. Capcom
  2. Raw Fury
  3. Chrous Worldwide
  4. DANGEN Entertainment
  5. Annapurna Interactive
  6. Nintendo
  7. Aksys Games
  8. Bethesda Softworks
  9. Sega
  10. Thunderful

And here’s how Metacritic put together this result:

“Which game publishers released the best games in 2023? For the 14th consecutive year, we sifted through 12 months of data to determine the best and worst game publishers of the year, based solely on the quality of their 2023 releases. Sales and user reviews do not factor into these rankings; only critic reviews (as captured by each game’s Metascore) are used to evaluate performance.

“Publishers are ranked from worst to best in the gallery above based on a points system, calculated (as in previous years) according to the following four factors: Average Metascore for all games released in 2023, % of scored products with good reviews (at least 75), % of scored products with bad reviews (49 or lower), Number of great titles (Metascore of 90 or higher”