Microsoft beats Sony as Metacritic’s top publisher of 2021 – Nintendo not even in the top 10

metro.co.uk:

Microsoft is Metacritic’s best publisher of 2021, with Sony coming just behind, but Nintendo nowhere in sight.

Another year means another Annual Game Publisher Rankings from Metacritic and the results of 2021 are certainly interesting. Microsoft being at number one shouldn’t be so surprising, given the games they had out last year, but what’s most shocking is that Nintendo didn’t even make the top 10.

After barely breaking in at number nine for the 2020 list, Nintendo’s 2021 releases weren’t enough to help it maintain its spot, dropping down to number 14.

As a reminder, these rankings are determined by the average Metascore for all games released that year, the percentage of scored games that get over 75%, the percentage of scored games with a score lower than 49%, and the number of games scoring over 90%.

It’s that last point that hurt Nintendo as while it certainly released several well received games in 2021, like Metroid Dread and Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, none of them managed to score higher than 90%.

Microsoft, or more specifically Xbox Game Studios, jumped from number six all the way to number one, with an average score of 87.4 across all its games. What’s especially impressive is that no company has ever managed to obtain an average score higher than 85 before.

As Metacritic explains, Microsoft didn’t publish that many games in 2021 when compared to previous years. The ones it did, however, were consistently high scorers, with the likes of Psychonauts 2, Forza Horizon 5, and Microsoft Flight Simulator all scoring above 90%.

Technically, Microsoft dominated the top five, as fourth and fifth place went to Activision Blizzard and Bethesda, respectively, with the latter already being part of Microsoft and the