Sony has been named the best publisher of 2022 by GameSpot sister site Metacritic in its 13th annual game publisher rankings. Metacritic criteria as his list was based on the average Metascore, the percentage of games with good review scores of 75 and above, the percentage of games with bad review scores of 49% and below, and the number of “great” games that managed to earn a Metascore of 90 or above last year.
During 2022, PlayStation released well-received games from its library, such as God of War Ragnarok, Horizon Forbidden West, and various PC ports of popular titles. This pushed Sony to the top spot, displacing Microsoft, which held the top spot in the 2021 ranking. Interestingly, Microsoft doesn’t even make the list because the company doesn’t meet one of the other criteria. “Only publishers with five or more different titles released in the past year are included in our rankings,” explained Metacritic, hence Microsoft’s complete absence here.
2022 was a bad year for Xbox when it came to exclusives, as Starfield and Redfall were pushed back to 2023, and Obsidian’s Pentiment was the only game released last year that was developed in-house. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer acknowledged Microsoft’s poor performance in 2022, and added that 2023 will be a better year for the company. For now, Xbox has fallen into the shadows Hi-Fi Rush, Redfall launches on May 2ndand Starfield will arrive in September.
While Sony is at the top of Metacritic’s list, a number of other publishers have also made significant gains in the rankings compared to their performance last year. Paradox Interactive, which didn’t make last year’s list, took second place, Focus Interactive jumped to fourth place, and Annapurna Interactive took eighth place.
The full list includes 45 publishers, with big names like Nintendo taking 12th place, Bandai Namco earning 24th place and Ubisoft dropping from 19th to 38th. Below you can see the results of the top 10 publishers for 2022 according to their average meta metrics, using Metacritic:
Metacritic’s 13th Annual Game Publisher Ratings
- Sony Interactive Entertainment — 85.6 (LY: 2)
- Paradox Interactive — 81.6 (LY: N/A)
- Activision Blizzard — 76.5 (LY: 4t
- Focus Entertainment — 80 (LY: 17)
- Take-Two — 78.9 (LY: 27)
- Capcom — 78.6 (LY: 6)
- Sega — 79.3 (LY: 8)
- Annapurna Interactive — 79.2 (LY: 18)
- Humble Games — 76.8 (LY: 3)
- Devolver Digital — 78.3 (LY: 11)
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