Sony Is Metacritic’s Highest-Rated Publisher Of 2022

Sony has been crowned the top publisher of 2022 according to Metacritic, GameSpot’s sister site, in its 13th annual Game Publisher Rankings list. Metacritic’s criteria for its list was based on average Metascore, a percentage of games with good review scores of 75 and above, a 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 higher last year.

PlayStation released well-received games such as God of War Ragnarok, Horizon Forbidden West, and various PC ports of popular titles from its library, throughout 2022. This propelled Sony to first place, dethroning Microsoft which held the top spot in the 2021 rankings. Interestingly, Microsoft isn’t even on the list due to the company failing to meet one of the other criteria parameters. “Only publishers with five or more distinct titles released last year are included in our rankings,” Metacritic explained, hence the complete absence of Microsoft here.

2022 wasn’t a good year for Xbox when it came to exclusives, as Starfield and Redfall were delayed into 2023, and Obsidian’s Pentiment was the only game released last year that was internally developed. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer acknowledged Microsoft’s poor output in 2022, and added that 2023 would be a better year for the company. So far, Xbox has shadow-dropped Hi-Fi Rush, Redfall launches on May 2, and Starfield will arrive in September.

While Sony is at the top of Metacritic’s list, a number of other publishers also scored big on the rankings when compared to their performance from the previous year. Paradox Interactive, which didn’t make the cut on last year’s list, took second place, Focus Interactive jumped to fourth place, and Annapurna Interactive earned an eighth-place finish.

The full list includes 45 publishers, with big names like Nintendo coming in at 12th place, Bandai Namco earning 24th place, and Ubisoft falling from 19th to 38th place. You can see the results below of the top 10 publishers for 2022 according to their average Metascores, via Metacritic:

Metacritic 13th annual Game Publisher Rankings list

1. Sony Interactive Entertainment — 85.6 (LY: 2)
2. Paradox Interactive — 81.6 (LY: N/A)
3. Activision Blizzard — 76.5 (LY: 4t
4. Focus Entertainment — 80 (LY: 17)
5. Take-Two — 78.9 (LY: 27)
6. Capcom — 78.6 (LY: 6)
7. Sega — 79.3 (LY: 8)
8. Annapurna Interactive — 79.2 (LY: 18)
9. Humble Games — 76.8 (LY: 3)
10. Devolver Digital — 78.3 (LY: 11)