Sega is Metacritic's top-ranked publisher of 2020

(Image credit: Sega, Ryu Ga Gotoku)

Every year review aggregator and argument-starter Metacritic publishes a list ranking videogame publishers based on the review scores of their releases over the previous 12 months. This time, Sega has been declared the winner thanks to games like the PC version of Persona 4 Golden (87), Football Manager 2021 (85), Yakuza: Like a Dragon (83), and various Total War DLCs that all averaged scores of 80. Re-releases of old games certainly helped, like the Xbox One port of Yakuza 0, which scored a 90.

Number two on the list was Annapurna Interactive, publisher of If Found… (84) and I am Dead (77), who did well out of the console versions of Kentucky Route Zero and Florence. In fact, they had a slightly higher average than Sega, 81.9 versus 81.6, but missed out on scoring bonus points by not having any games score an average of 90 or higher. Take it up with Metacritic.

Capcom were publisher number three and Sony were four, with Activision Blizzard in fifth. That's a drop from last year's second place position for Activision Blizzard, with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 (88) a high-scoring outlier preventing a further slide.

It was a bigger drop for 505 Games, who were 2019's top-ranked publisher thanks to Control (85) and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (83), but dropped back to 13th place in the latest ranking.

Here's the top 10. Note that mobile games weren't included in the judging.

1 Sega
2 Annapurna Interactive
3 Capcom
4 Sony
5 Activision Blizzard
6 Microsoft
7 Aksys Games
8 No More Robots
9 Nintendo
10 Devolver Digital

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.