Visual Concepts 'most consistent' developer

Following on from research conducted by GameQuarry into the consistency of publishers using Metacritic data, the company has now put together a similar survey for developers.

Ranked top of the list of 1700 companies is Visual Concepts, the Take-Two studio responsible for many of the 2K Sports titles, producing 10 A-ranked titles of 90 per cent or higher, 40 B-ranked titles of 80-89 per cent, 11 C-ranked titles of 70-79 per cent, 7 D-ranked titles of 60-69 per cent and 4 F-ranked titles of 59 per cent or lower.

As with the publisher survey each Metacritic level was awarded points, with an A-ranked title worth 2 points, B-ranked games getting 1 point, C-ranked games getting nothing, and D- and F-ranked games losing 1 and 2 points respectively.

Visual Concepts therefore ended up with a total score of 45 points based on titles that it developed between 2000 and 2008.

EA Tiburon came in second with a score of 43, while Nintendo's internal studio was third with 42 points.

Other notable entries in the top ten include Harmonix at seventh, Sports Interactive at eighth and Valve at tenth, while Rockstar North, BioWare, Criterion, Bethesda Softworks and Epic Games all make the top twenty.

There are some caveats to the data, however, with the report's author noting: " I'm sure that out of the 1700 or so developers, some of the applicable studio detail may not be intact. For example, the Sony developers and associated studio regions may not be entirely accurate. Although I did normalize the developer names to address spelling anomalies, that is about all I did. There may be some devs that were rolled up under master studios (eg EA Sports) where accurate studio/dev breakdowns didn't exist."

The top twenty list is as follows:

• 1. Visual Concepts
• 2. EA Tiburon
• 3. Nintendo
• 4. EA Sports
• 5. Neversoft Entertainment
• 6. Konami Tokyo
• 7. Harmonix
• 8. Sports Interactive
• 9. Intelligent Systems
• 10. Valve
• 11. Rockstar North
• 12. BioWare
• 13. EA Canada
• 14. Criterion
• 15. Bethesda Softworks
• 16. Raven Software
• 17. Firaxis
• 18. Insomniac Games
• 19. Infinity Ward
• 20. Epic Games