Microsoft Reveals Who The Biggest Publishers In The Industry Are

gameranx.com:

Microsoft has shared some very juicy information. Without sharing their source, they have disclosed the biggest publishers in video games.

They actually shared a specific table, that shows the distribution of each publisher to the PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo platforms respectively. You already saw that table above, but they have also elaborated in the finer details of their response to the CMA’s provisional findings.

Microsoft makes some clarifications to this diagram. It was based on global game sales data in 2021. Because of the nature of free-to-play games, they weren’t incorporated into it.

Now, here’s what Microsoft has to say, starting from page 15:

“PlayStation gamers buy games from a large range of publishers to play on their console. EA is the largest supplier of games to PlayStation, followed by Ubisoft and Take Two.

Sony itself is the fourth largest game publisher in the world and the fourth largest supplier to PlayStation. The fact that the blue band running from Sony to PlayStation is so wide is an indication of the extent to which Sony keeps its own published games almost entirely exclusive to PlayStation.

In fact, Sony has 286 games which are exclusive to PlayStation, including some of the most successful and popular titles such as God of War, Spider-Man and Last of Us.”

So that is a lot to take in. In spite of appearances, EA was the biggest publisher on PlayStation. Remember, this data isn’t based on the number of titles that EA brought to PlayStation, but the number of game sales instead.

We can guess on where EA gets that large a share of the PlayStation business too. EA’s sports games, FIFA 21 and Madden NFL 2021, probably went a big way towards guaranteeing they would get a lion’s share of sales,