Although they aren’t perfect, Capcom has certainly been on a roll for basically five or six years straight with the last being especially good for the storied developer.
Metacritic recently released its rankings for the best rated game publishers for 2023 where Capcom actually came out in first place.
According to the 14th annual rankings, Capcom’s overall score taking into account factors like average game review scores, ratio of positive/negative reviews, and titles rated above 90 on Metacritic was 325.7 and average review score of 84.5.
That’s quite a bit higher than Raw Fury in second place with a score of 318.6, Nintendo at sixth with 312.1, Bethesda Softworks at eighth with 308.3 and Sega at ninth with 306.1.
Last year marks the second time Capcom has reached that achievement with the first time coming in 2019.
This success seems to be largely on the backs of three games in particular with Resident Evil 4’s 93 Metascore for reviews, Street Fighter 6’s 92 score and Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective’s 84.
Capcom did release a statement regarding the news, but it was posted to their Investor Relations page — so it’s aimed at shareholders over the general gaming audience.
“In this 14th Annual Game Publisher Ranking, Capcom was recognized for the overall critical acclaim that it received for its games, marking the second time Capcom has taken the top spot, which it previously won in the 2019 ranking. These games included Resident Evil 4, which has sold over 7 million units since its March 2023 release approximately one year ago, Street Fighter 6, a fighting game for the new generation that is heating up the modern esports scene, and Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, an updated revival from Capcom’s library of titles.
Capcom remains firmly committed to satisfying the expectations of all stakeholders by leveraging its industry-leading game development capabilities in order to create highly entertaining gameplay experiences.”
Interestingly, no mention was made of Street Fighter’s sales, but we do know as of January 2024, the flagship fighting game had crossed 3 million copies sold.
As for other fighting game publishers on the ranking list, PQube was 35th and Bandai Namco was rated 27th with 254.5 points though it obviously doesn’t count Tekken 8’s big launch earlier this year.
Despite posting record profits and strong game sales, Capcom has been catching ire from their playerbase for their microtransaction approaches in titles like SF6 and Dragon’s Dogma 2 recently as well as DRM policy for certain games.
This should hopefully prove to be good news for the future of Street Fighter 6 and potential other fighting games coming down the pipeline as long as Capcom doesn’t alienate its base with business practices largely outside of their consistently solid core designs.