Microsoft tops Metacritic game publisher rankings for 2021

What happened now? Microsoft’s gaming business did well last year, releasing some of the best games in 12 months. Its achievements are reflected in Metacritic’s 12th annual game publisher rankings, which ranked the Redmond-based firm first among 42 others as the best publisher of 2021.

Metacritic ratings his list top publishers across multiple criteria: Metascore average of all games released this year, percentage of products with good reviews (at least 75 points), percentage of products with bad reviews (49 or below), and number of titles that fall into the Excellent category (90 or higher with a minimum of 7 reviews).

Xbox Game Studios released five games last year, although there were 10 entries on Metacritic due to the different platforms they were released on. In addition to being ranked No. 1, the company has the distinction of being the first with an average Metacritic score of over 85 (87.4) in the 12 years Metacritic has maintained its publisher rankings.

All of Microsoft’s games were rated “good,” with three of them scoring over 90, meaning “excellent”: Forza Horizon 5, Psychonauts 2, and the Xbox Series X version of Flight Simulator. Halo Infinite managed 87, if you’re wondering.

Sony is in second place behind Microsoft. His ten games averaged 81.3 points, with all but one rated good and none great. Sony’s average score of 81.3 would be better if not for Destruction Allstars (62) omitting it.

Top 10 publishers of 2021 according to Metacritic

Rounding out the rest of the top five are Humble Games, which ranked 18th in the previous list, Activision Blizzard and Bethesda Softworks.

Elsewhere, Sega, which topped the 2020 list, dropped to 8th, Electronic Arts to 9th, and Nintendo to 14th.