Nintendo was the top-rated publisher in Metacritic’s 2014 rankings. In 2015, the company came in at the sixth spot.
Nintendo’s best overall release last year was Mario Kart 8’s second DLC pack, which earned a 90 percent average (also users’ favorite at 9.2). On the other end of the spectrum, Devil’s Third was the worst with an average of 43 percent from critics. Splatoon was the best new IP with 81 percent.
Here’s the analysis from Metacritic:
“It wasn’t a good year for the Nintendo brand. A year after finishing first in our rankings, Nintendo saw its average Metascore decline by nearly five points and its percentage of games receiving positive reviews fall from 56% to just 41%. The company once again released more unique titles than any other publisher, but too few of them connected with critics. The duds seemed to be spread fairly evenly among Nintendo’s two platforms, with its Wii U titles averaging 71.3 and its 3DS games averaging 71.9.”
And here are the overall 2015 rankings:
| Metascore | Good Games | Bad Games | Great Games | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Publisher | Avg. | Pts. | % | Pts. | % | Pts. | # | Pts. | Total Pts. | |
| 1 | Sega | 77.1 | 115.7 | 65% | 64.7 | 0% | 100.0 | 0 | 0 | 280.4 |
| 2 | Telltale Games | 74.6 | 111.9 | 55% | 54.8 | 0% | 100.0 | 1 | 5 | 271.7 |
| 3 | Sony | 74.4 | 111.6 | 54% | 54.2 | 4% | 95.8 | 2 | 10 | 271.6 |
| 4 | Activision Blizzard | 72.0 | 108.0 | 53% | 52.8 | 8% | 91.7 | 0 | 0 | 252.5 |
| 5 | Devolver Digital | 73.5 | 110.2 | 40% | 40.0 | 0% | 100.0 | 0 | 0 | 250.2 |
| 6 | Nintendo | 71.7 | 107.5 | 41% | 40.6 | 6% | 93.8 | 1 | 5 | 246.9 |
| 7 | Electronic Arts | 71.9 | 107.9 | 33% | 33.3 | 0% | 100.0 | 0 | 0 | 241.3 |
| 8 | Bandai Namco Games | 69.5 | 104.2 | 31% | 30.8 | 4% | 96.2 | 0 | 0 | 231.2 |
| 9 | Ubisoft | 69.9 | 104.9 | 18% | 17.9 | 0% | 100.0 | 0 | 0 | 222.8 |
Sega number 1 publisher, really? There must be something wrong here.
