Matt Matthews explores game review averages and game output for the major publishers over the past three years. Who's on top, who's at the bottom, and what does it mean for 2008?

A little over two weeks ago Kotaku's Luke Plunkett posted the following graph from a presentation that Electronic Arts made to analysts. It compares EA's Metacritic averages against those of several other publishers:

Of course, this is only EA and a dozen of its competitors. I couldn't help but wonder where all the other publishers ended up on this scale. For example, where is Capcom?

Below are more complete graphs showing all publishers with 10 or more games in each calendar year. Along the way I found some other interesting tidbits, like how the population of publishers is changing and a measure of just how large EA would be if it acquired Take-Two Interactive.

Publisher Rankings, 2005 to 2007

As promised, here is the extended version of the publisher review averages for 2007.



As before, my data came from GameRankings, so there are no doubt some differences between EA's chart and mine. The biggest difference, however, is that EA excluded some notable companies like LucasArts, Capcom, and Atlus – all of whom have decent review averages. They also publish far fewer games, which is probably why EA didn't consider them important enough to go in a report to analysts and investors.

In his original blog, Kotaku's Plunkett quipped that Atari probably wasn't included because the scale “starts all the way up at 60 percent." This was right on the money for 2007, as Atari comes in at a miserable 55.5 percent in the reviews. Of course, that's nothing compared to companies like DSI and Conspiracy Entertainment, the latter of which published the notorious Ninjabread Man for the Nintendo Wii.

There are some other differences between my figures and those that EA showed, and I have some theories about those. Consider the case of Activision, which earned a 66 percent in the EA chart and a 62 percent in mine. First, Metacritic has some different review information from GameRankings, so it is possible that one site or the other is missing some reviews. Second, I considered games with as few as 1 review score; one could certainly take issue with that, since it will generally drag down publishers of low-visibility licensed games. Finally, it isn't clear whether EA included all of a publisher's subsidiaries, like the Activision Value division of Activision. I took the time to group these subsidiaries into the average for the larger publisher, thus Activision Value got included with Activision, Global Star Software got included with Take Two Interactive, and so on. [Note: Microsoft PR e-mailed Next-Gen emphasizing that the "Microsoft Game Studios" brand represents first-party developed, higher-scoring titles overseen by VP Shane Kim, while the "Microsoft" brand is second party and separate from Kim's responsibilities. As with Sony and Nintendo, we included first- and second-party software for Microsoft's ranking.]