Nintendo had a pretty good year

Develop Magazine's annual list of studios' brilliance at taking all of our money has been released, and Nintendo has lost their 2007 top spot to World of Warcraft devs Blizzard.

The top studio jumped up an astonishing 46 places from last year's list, mostly due to their $100 million revenue per month in subscriber fees from WoW players, but also for providing $1.34 billion to Activision-Blizzard's bottom line. Yikes.

Nintendo's runner-up spot was in honor of the evergreen sales trajectory its games are enjoying, with Develop noting that Mario Kart DS, Brain Training, Nintendogs and New Super Mario Bros. each sold between three and four million in 2008. Not bad for games from four years ago.

Other notable devs include Capcom coming in at 5, Pokemon-house Game Freak at 30 and Intelligent Systems, creators of Fire Emblem, WarioWare and Paper Mario in at 97. Sony in-house devs SCE London and SCE Japan take 36 and 82 respectively, and LittleBigPlanet devs Media Molecule rank 17. Unless I'm wildly mistaken, the highest MS-exclusive studio is Bungie at 53.

The list is based off sales data, review aggregate scores and "instinctual elements" like reputation, publisher relations and that twinkle in their eye.

[source develop100.com]