Specific Criteria

 

There is no single formula for determining the “best” publisher. If one wishes to look at game quality as reflected in published reviews, then immensely profitable companies that produce some poorly-reviewed movie licensed games along with other very good titles will rank poorly. One could consider revenue separate from profit, or profit independent of revenue, or any variety of different measures. The rankings will vary with each choice of criterion.

For this reason, we have taken a look at each company as a whole, not by a single measure, and made our choices. Your personal choices may well differ, but these are ours. Feel free to disagree – we just ask that you do so politely and constructively.

About E3 and Aging of Information

The data for this piece was collected and prepared during May and June 2008. This means that some new software may have been announced along with new fiscal data at E3 in July. Since most companies in this overview started a new fiscal year on 1 April 2008, we felt it best to use the the 1 April 2007 to 31 March 2008 period for analyzing everyone, although some company data simply could not be fit to this schedule.

 

1. A primary criterion was revenue for the fiscal year 4/1/2007 to 3/31/2008.
2. In a case where a company may have a fiscal year ending on a different date we have either recomputed that company's financial data for the year 4/1/2007 to 3/31/2008 or the nearest possible 12-month period.
3. All currency values have been converted into U.S. Dollars using historical exchange rates.
4. Another primary criterion was profit for the fiscal year 4/1/2007 to 3/31/2008, with the same modifications as made for revenue.
5. When a net profit is not available, operating profits (for internal game publishing divisions) have been used. (For example, only the revenue and operating profits of Konami's game publishing business has been considered – not its Health & Fitness and Arcade Gaming divisions.)
6. When company's publishing arm is within a larger division (see, for example, Microsoft's EDD which contains Microsoft Game Studios), we have tried to account for that. That is, not all of the division's revenue and operating profit is assumed to be from publishing
7. We also considered a company's momentum, based on percentage change in revenue and/or profit over the last three years.
8. To a lesser extent we considered the number of titles and number of units in our Top 100 Best Selling Games.
9. Finally, we have included each company's average review score across all titles published in 2007, but this did not figure into our company rankings.