Three different titles scored 90 or higher (also tops among all publishers): the latest Forza Horizon racer, a sequel to Psychonauts, and the Xbox Series X version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. But what games it did publish were uniformly excellent, making Microsoft the only publisher with a 100% success rate. Our runaway winner of this year's Publisher of the Year honors, Microsoft certainly published fewer titles in 2021 than it does in a typical year. But how often does a company average above 85 ? Never.

It is very rare for a publisher to average above 80 for its releases across a single calendar year. release dates and publishers are used for all games except those never released in the U.S.ġ0 scored products (5 distinct titles): 100% good, 0% bad All scores in this report are from January 31, 2022, and U.S. Only publishers with five or more distinct titles released last year are included in our rankings.įinally, note that iOS games are excluded from all calculations. Note that the Metascore average (the first factor) counts slightly more than the other factors. 7 reviews)Īwarded as 5 bonus points for each distinct title with a 90+ score (4) Number of 'great' titles (Metascore of 90 or higher, min. (3) % of scored products with bad reviews ( 49 or lower in this case, a lower % is better)ġ00 possible points (ex: 20% bad = 80 points)

(2) % of scored products with good reviews (Metascore of at least 75)ġ00 possible points (ex: 80% good = 80 points) (1) Average Metascore for all games released in 2021ġ50 possible points (awarded at 1.5 x the average Metascore) Publishers are ranked from worst to best in the gallery above based on a points system, calculated (as in previous years) according to the following four factors:

Sales and user reviews do not factor into these rankings only critic reviews (as captured by each game's Metascore) are used to evaluate performance. Which game publishers released the best games in 2021? For the 12th straight year, we sifted through 12 months of data to determine the best and worst game publishers of the year, based solely on the quality of their 2021 releases.

Ms publisher 2021