Bethesda beats Nintendo to top of Metacritic publisher rankings

Score aggregator Metacritic has shared a report on the best and worst game publishers from 2017 recently, using critic reviews from their releases in the entire year to evaluate their performance, and it's good news for Bethesda, as strong releases like Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus saw them stand in first place above all others.

To give a bit of information on methodology first, here is how Metacritic justified their conclusions: "We divided publishers into two separately ranked groups, based on the number of titles released during the previous calendar year. Our first group consists of the biggest companies, who each published 12 or more distinct titles (with Metascores) during 2017. The remaining "mid-size" publishers, detailed further down the page, each released between 6-11 distinct titles last year. Publishers with 5 or fewer Distinct Titles are excluded."

As such the company has ranked publishers in order from best overall game quality to worst, using a formula based on four factors: average Metascore for all games released last year; percentage of scored products with good reviews (Metascore of at least 75); percentage of products with bad reviews (49 or below, with a lower percentage being better in this case); and the amount of great titles (Metascore of 90 or higher with a minimum of seven reviews). It's worth noting that the Metascore average counts slightly more than the other factors though, and that iOS games aren't included in the figures.

As mentioned, Bethesda tops the pile with an average Metascore of 79.9, featuring 12 distinct titles and 23 total products, some of which include The Evil Within II, Wolfenstein II, Prey, and their worst-scored release, Doom VFR. Nintendo comes in second place with an average Metascore of 78 though, which some may consider surprising considering the release of the Switch and games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Mario Odyssey, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

In the incredibly tight table of 12 major publishers, Telltale Games comes at the bottom of the pile with an average Metascore of 70.9, not helped by the fact that 2017 saw sporadic releases of different episodes from series like The Walking Dead and Guardians of the Galaxy.

For all the scores and statistics, check out the full report, which also ranks mid-sized publishers too. Do you think Bethesda is a worthy winner?