Metacritic's publisher rankings methodology is a joke:
1. They reward publishers releasing the least amount of distinct titles (as long as they're more than 5). So hypothetically speaking, if Nintendo releases 7 distinct titles scoring 90 and 10 titles scoring between 70-89, they would easily lose to Sony releasing 5 games scoring 90 and zero games scoring lower. The system would penalize the more productive publisher that is actually releasing more "must-haves" AND 10 more decent/good/great games.
2. In 2021 MS barely qualified, releasing 5 distinct titles (the bare minimum) including a port and yet easily won. Basically, the port made the difference between Microsoft not qualitfying and winning by a large margin lol.
3. They don't distinguish between ports and new releases, or big and small releases.
4. They count multiplats as "multiple products". So Psychonauts 2 (a Microsoft multiplat) scoring high would be evaluated as multiple games and inflate the publisher score. Conversely, MLB (a Sony multiplat) scoring relatively low skewed downward.
5. They disregard review count per game (as long as it's over 4 reviews). For instance: the Xbox One version of Psychonauts 2 was the highest scoring version despite actually being the worst (91 on X1. 87 on XS).
6. In 2021, Nintendo (18 distinct titles vs Sony's 10 and Microsoft's 5) ranked 14th. I'm not saying releasing more games automatically makes them the better publisher, but productivity is not a bad thing, and more in this context is not less.
7. There was a general sentiment that Sony's 2021 was one of their worst years (I don't necessarily agree)... and yet Metacritic had them at 2nd place only behind Microsoft.
Productivity should be viewed as a positive element, ports shouldn't weigh as much as new releases, and only one version of multiplats should be counted. Until those adjustments are made, I can't take those rankings seriously, let alone use them as an objective metric of quality.
As someone who wants Sony to give us more A and AA games (like Convallaria and Stellar Blade), Metacritic's publisher ranking methodology sets a bad precedent and penalizes supporting new/small studios and less popular genres. It's some "N64 is better than the PS1 because look at the average score!" level bullshit. Publishers shouldn't be rewarded for doing less.
