SEGA #1 on Metacritic’s Annual Game Publisher Rankings List

Metacritic has released their list of the publishers with the highest average metascore for games released in 2020, and it comes at no surprise that SEGA is NUMBER ONE. While other gaming news sites have shared this story and acted like it’s insane to even thing SEGA is number one, no doubt because of some nonsense about how Sonic ’06 was bad 15 years ago or something, we here at SEGAbits have seen SEGA’s 2020 output and can easily see why they’d take the top spot. Release good games, get good results!

SEGA News Bits: SEGA and CAPCOM Beat EA in Publisher Rankings

Metacritic’s ninth annual game publisher rankings revealed some good news for SEGA fans! Our favorite publisher placed second, beating out heavy weights like EA. On this SEGA News Bits, we discuss the top three and what they did to deserve their spots.

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SEGA places second in Metacritic’s game publisher rankings

2018 certainly felt like a great year for SEGA and ATLUS games, and the recently released list of game publisher rankings by Metacritic solidifies it. While SEGA placed 3rd in 2017’s list, 2018’s list sees SEGA moving up a spot to second!

Sega landed in our top 3 for the third time in four years (with the exception coming in a year when Sega failed to release enough games to qualify for our “major” publishers group). That’s especially impressive given that Sega released more distinct titles than all but one other publisher in 2018. Note that all of Sega’s averages and totals include games published by Atlus, a recently acquired Sega subsidiary that (as of 2018) now shares top-level management with the parent company.

SEGA ranked 3rd best publisher of 2017 by Metacritic

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The people over at Metacritic has ranked the best publishers of 2017, determined by the quality of titles released during the 2017 calendar year. SEGA came in 3rd only being beaten by Bethesda Software and Nintendo. According to Metacritic, SEGA’s average score for the year was 75.5%! The worse rated game was Valkyria Revolution with a 55% score and the best was Bayonetta on PC with a 90%. SEGA bested big publishers like Activision Blizzard, Capcom, Ubisoft, Sony, and Square-Enix.

This is more proof that SEGA has been heading down the right direction since they had their huge restructure back in 2015 and got their new CEO Haruki Satomi who promised to earn gamer’s trust again by releasing more high quality software. What are your thoughts on SEGA’s output in 2017? Let us know in the comments below!

Metacritic ranks SEGA as their #1 publisher of 2015

SEGAMetacriticPublisher2015While SEGA didn’t release a lot of games during their 2015 year, the critics seemed to like the games they did release. From their SEGA 3D Classics to niche Japanese titles like Hatsune Miku: Project Mirai DX.  Metacritic ranks SEGA as their #1 publisher of 2015, beating the likes of companies like Sony Computer Entertainment, TellTale Games and yeah, even Nintendo. It seems that people already are calling this unfair due to most of the titles being re-releases, but their really good and add new content. I suggest people having issues with this to ask Metacritic to change the rules. When was the last time you could say ‘Metacritic ranks SEGA #1’?

Here are the list of publishers and how they ranked:

  1. SEGA – 77.1%
  2. Telltale Games – 74.6%
  3. Sony – 74.4%
  4. Activision Blizzard – 72%
  5. Devolver Digital – 73.5%
  6. Nintendo – 71.7%
  7. EA – 71.9%
  8. Bandai Namco – 69.5%
  9. Ubisoft – 69.9%

Seems that SEGA’s new stradegy of releasing fewer titles but making sure the titles that are released are of ‘good to great’ quality might be the solution to rebuilding their brand. This year we have (in the west) games like Valkyria Chronicles Remastered, Yakuza 0 (maybe), 7th Dragon III: Code VFC, Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice, Total War: Warhammer, SEGA 3D Classics Collection, and even that rumored Sonic 25th Anniversary game. If all goes as planned, SEGA might top the list again. Metacritic ranks SEGA #1, how do you feel about this?

SEGA and Atlus storm Metacritic’s best-reviewed 3DS games chart

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Metacritic have released their list of the 25 best reviewed 3DS titles of 2015 where SEGA and Atlus have swept the floor with the competition. Metacritic– for those who don’t know– compiles review scores from major video game critics to find the average score.

SEGA and Atlus boast almost half of the list with 12 of the 25 spots, including two of the highest rated games; 3D Streets of Rage II and 3D Gunstar Heroes both scoring a well deserved 89/100. (Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask 3D also scored 89.)
Also worth mentioning is SEGA and Atlus’ success on the PS Vita in 2015, where they claimed 5 of the top 25 best scoring games.
Unsurprisingly the duo didn’t fair so well on home console, having barely released anything for those systems 2015. Choosing to bump many of their games in 2016 for longer development cycles.

Hit the jump for the full list of 3DS titles in Metacritics 2015 highest scoring list..

Metacritic Scores Individual Developers

How annoying is it to get into an argument about how good a game is, only to have somebody throw a link to Metacritic at you? Well gamers can rejoice, as now that same thing can apply to arguing how good a developer is!

Metacritic has recently added the ability to search for individual developers, with each developer given their own score based on the games they’ve worked on. Of course, this is in no way a proper method of scoring how “good” somebody is, as even an assistant co-co-co-producer credit for an amazing game can bring up the score of an otherwise awful person. Also, some great retro games are not rated or credits are not yet given. For example, Morio Kishimoto is at a 69 but is only rated for his work on Sonic and the Secret Rings. He also directed Sonic Colors but has yet to be credited or scored for that.

After the break, check out the pointless numbers now assigned to our favorite (or least favorite) SEGA devs! It’s like in high school, when you’d rate the boys… or girls. I rated the girls. Yeah…

SEGA comes 9th in Metacritic 2010 Game Publisher Rankings


SEGA came in 9th place for the 2010 publisher rankings over at Metacritic. They take the publishers’ MetaScore for their 2011 line up and place them in order. SEGA averaged 67.4%, with their best rated title being Bayonetta (90%) and their worst being Iron Man 2 (41%).

SEGA delivered some really great software. Some of our favorite titles included After Burner Climax, Phantasy Star Portable 2, Valkyria Chronicles 2, Sonic Colors and Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing. So for SEGA fans, it was a pretty good year. Next time SEGA should trim the crap, leave the good stuff.

Check out the full list here.

SEGA de-listing Sonic games with low scores


Can you erase history? SEGA seems like they want to, deleting their lower scoring Sonic games from history. How do they judge if a game is ‘low scoring’? Metacritic.

“Any Sonic game with an average Metacritic has been de-listed. We have to do this and increase the value of the brand. This will be very important when more big Sonic releases arrive in the future.” – Jurgen Post, SEGA’s Senior Vice President of EMEA

Jurgen says they want to keep the number of Sonic titles on shelves lower, only to the best available games. That way users won’t get confused seeing 10 or more Sonic titles on the shelves.

Sounds reasonable. So if you want to get brand new copies of Sonic & The Black Knight or Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, you should go and get them now. Actually don’t, use that money to get Sonic 4.

[Thanks: ROJM]