battlefield

EA has seen a dramatic drop in its Metacritic publisher ranking for 2017. The website puts together lists every year of all of the biggest publishers, putting them in order of how well their games performed in terms of reviews. This gives a good idea of how well a publisher and its titles performed over the last 12 months.

For 2017, EA actually fell out of the major publisher category altogether. This was due to the fact that they had a smaller release schedule than usual. To qualify as a major publisher on Metacritic, a company must release at least 12 games. However, EA also fell in terms of its ranking scores. These use a variety of measures to determine how successful a title was and rely heavily on whether a game was considered good by reviewers, which is judged by if they scored 75 or more on average.

With EA having less games to release in the previous year and the poor critical reception of both Star Wars Battlefront 2 and Need for Speed meant that they were only ranked fifth on the mid-tier publisher list. Nicalis, Paradox Interactive, Devolver Digital, and Warner Bros. Interactive all outperformed the California based company.

Bethesda and Nintendo led to the way for the major publishers. They had an average Metacritic rating of 79.9 and 78 respectively for their 2017 releases, with 90% of Bethesda’s games considered good.