It's that time of the year where Metacritic collates and gathers tons of information about how the respective video game publishers performed over the last calendar year. The data is gathered by taking into account average Metascore across all of the games a publisher has released, on top of total launched games and how many of these classify as "Great" games (Metascore of 90 or higher), "Bad" (49 or below), or "Good" (a least a score of 75). To this end, despite Sega topping the charts in 2025, a different Japanese publisher has risen to the cream of the crop this time around.
Square Enix has come out on top with a total score of 330.5 points, which is largely down to having nine launched products that classify as at least Good and one of these being a Great project too, with that being Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth on PC.
Metacritic touches on Square Enix topping the charts with: "Ranking #1 for the very first time in our 16 years of compiling these rankings, Japanese publisher Square Enix received positive reviews for every one of its 2025 releases while increasing its average Metascore by five points compared to the prior year. A variety of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest titles scored highly for the publisher last year (and also in early 2026), while even its "worst" 2025 release, SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered, earned approval from critics."
As for the rest of the top ten, you can see this information below, with the major names that missed out on the top ten including Ubisoft (11th), Nintendo (12th), Sony (21st), and Bandai Namco (24th).
Square Enix - 330.5 points
Gamirror Games - 322.4 points
Capcom - 322.2 points
Thunderful - 306.8 points
Microsoft - 305.7 points
Take-Two Interactive - 304.0 points
Sega - 303.9 points
Electronic Arts - 302.9 points
Dotemu - 302.2 points
Raw Fury - 301.0 points
Are you surprised by any of this data?