Next-Gen’s second annual list of the industry’s biggest publishers focuses on industry change, as the challenges and opportunities of the hardware transition begin to reflect in company finances. Plenty of statistics and analysis detail the emerging winners and losers…

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Next-Gen.Biz's annual Publishing Giants feature is a list of the top game publishers operating in the game industry, according to their success in the last 12 months. It is repeated in the summer every year, and includes market share, revenues, profits and other pertinent financial statistics. In addition, review statistics are included to strike a balance between economic and creative success.  

This list is ordered by each publisher’s market share. In cases where multiple publishers control similarly-sized slices of this pie, the final placing is additionally informed by revenues, profits, review score, and performance changes over the previous year. This kind of analysis does involve a certain amount of subjectivity, and we request that you keep that in mind as you read this feature.

Notes on Statistics

The vast majority of statistics were culled from the most recent fiscal year financial statements of each company, and additionally corroborated against NPD statistics and additional input from analysts. Stock prices were gathered from Reuters and Dow Jones Marketwatch.

Market Share is an estimate based on NPD statistics tracking retail sales of handheld, PC and console games.
Stock prices are marked with their associated stock tag to help differentiate between the prices of companies traded in multiple markets.
In some cases financial data has been converted to US dollars using current exchange rates. As a result of this, data calculated using the statistics of this feature and our 2006 feature may not reflect accurate information, as exchange rate changes confuse the arithmetic. As a result of this, most year-on-year financial changes presented in this article were taken directly from the companies’ financial statements.
Employee numbers were taken from most recent company statements if available. Year-on-year changes to employee count are only presented in cases where accurate information was provided by the company.
Top 100 SKUs are for retail handheld, console, and PC games.
Franchises over 80% provided courtesy of Gamerankings, and represents the brands that earned aggregate review scores of 80% or higher.
 
If you have evidence that any of the information provided in this report is inaccurate, please e-mail us.

NEXT: Market share visualized