Ubisoft Ranked Higher Than Nintendo & Bandai Namco in Metacritic's Publishers Rating

Metacritic, the largest review aggregator and one of the few sources offering insight into the gaming community's general opinion on any given video game, has revealed its annual 2025 Game Publisher Rankings list, rating 37 game publishing studios with five or more distinct titles released in 2024.

Determining each publisher's placement based on factors such as the average Metascore for all released games and the percentages of products with positive and negative reviews, the list ranked Fulqrum Publishing, Nacon/Daedalic, and PQube – the studios behind Forgive Me Father 2, Ravenswatch, and Celestia: Chain of Fate, respectively – as the three worst-performing publishers of the previous year.

Perp Games, which ranked dead last in last year's rankings, has, relatively speaking, improved its position, moving up to 34th place out of 37, while Bandai Namco, the publisher of Elden Ring, remained in the same spot as in 2024, coming in at 27th. Nintendo, a favorite of many critics, dropped from 6th to 22nd this year, with Metacritic citing "relatively lackluster results" from the company's key franchises as the primary reason for the decline.

Opening this year's Top-5 is Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II's Focus Entertainment at #5, Sony at #4, and Spirit Hunter: Death Mark II's Aksys Games at #3. Capcom, the leader of the aggregator's 2024 list, has dropped from its top spot, making way for Sega, which dominated the list thanks to games like Metaphor: ReFantazio, Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance, and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

Most amusingly, Metacritic has placed Ubisoft – a company that made more missteps than any other big-league developer in 2024 and hasn't released a single game that would succeed both financially and reputationally – in the middle of the list, raking it 18th out of 37, higher than Konami, Electronic Arts, Plaion, and the previously mentioned Nintendo and Bandai Namco.

While such a placement may cause an uncontrollable fit of laughter, it's important to point out that Metacritic's methodology only considered critics' reviews, not publishers' sales numbers or user scores from people who buy and play video games.

Considering it's now an open secret that gaming journalists – the "critics" Metacritic refers to – have no incentive to give AAA games low scores, no matter how poorly-made they might be, and the fact that critic scores don't always correlate with those given by actual gamers, and definitely don't represent a game's profitability, it's clear why Ubisoft ended up so high on the list despite having the worst year in its history, but still, seeing such a disliked studio "win on a technicality" is undeniably humorous.

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