Sega had a very good year last year, and now it has the Metacritic seal of approval to prove it. Thanks in large part to Persona and Yakuza, the company is Metacritic’s 2020 publisher of the year.
Metacritic has just posted its publisher ranking for the last year, listing all the major games publishers in order of the best scored games. Moving up 17 places from last year, Sega is now at number one with an average score of 81.6, and it owes much of that success to Atlus. Unsurprisingly, Persona 5 Royal is Sega’s best reviewed game on the website – not that we’d know, we’re still waiting on a PC port – Yakuza 0 coming in second. Between them, the RPG games series and crime games series appear numerous times in Sega’s top 25, Persona 4 Golden showing up at number five.
Football Manager 2021, Two Point Hospital, and Total War do their part. Three DLC packs for Total War: Three Kingdoms are listed, as is Total War: Troy. It should be noted Metacritic’s scores are included for any North American release made within the calendar year. The Bayonetta and Vanquish collection, a double-pack of the action-adventure games, is just outside the top ten, as is the latest version of Sonic The Hedgehog 2. Having such a back catalogue of old games is definitely a strength in these sort of charts.
Coming in second is Annapurna, the only publisher with an all-green Metacritic score, since all of its games last year reviewed well. With the likes of Kentucky Route Zero, If Found…, and a Switch port of Florence, Annapurna has very much established itself as one of the leading indie game publishers over the last year or two.
Here’s a trailer for Yakuza: Like A Dragon, the latest in the series:
A PC version of Persona 5 Strikers was released, and another in the overarching series is on the way, Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne.