Sega Tops Metacritic's 2020 Publisher Rankings, Nintendo Squeezes Into Top Ten

Wow Nintendo beaten by No More Robots really shows what kind of software effort they're putting in these days

Just goes to show what little you can take from these stats.

Is anyone still paying any attention to Metacritic? It's just not a place I go to. I prefer more nuanced pictures of games coming out. The Metacritic system is anything but scientific and objective.

Just shows that stats can be shown to prove anything whatsoever you want and doesnt mean anything

The point is fair that Nintendo didn't put out a lot of top-rated games last year. The ones with lower overall ratings will have moved them down the list. Things like Clubhouse Games, Super Mario 35, Mario Kart Live and Paper Mario got decent reviews from most critics and are all good games, but not the full marks like Animal Crossing and other classics from previous years and therefore lowered the average. It's just a way of saying what we all already knew, that last year wasn't a classic year for Nintendo. Super Mario 3D All Stars is still my game of the year though. 😁

Nintendo would had gotten a much better score had they celebrated Mario's 35th anniversary the correct way by not being lazy and scummy. I know Sega sucks nowadays but at least they know how to make up for their fans and actually admit that they sucks at most of what they do.

To be fair, Nintendo was in the top 5 in 2017, 2018 and 2019, they're more consistent than most publishers
Sega was number 18 last year

Persona 5 Royal carrying Sega, I see

Who even listens to Metacritic? It isn't a very reliable way to gauge the quality of games.

A lot of denial in the comments already....Nintendo has been coasting. They are getting a little smug, so they aren’t putting in the effort we saw the first two years of the Switch’s release.

Sadly I didnt buy a single switch game last year. I buy Nintendo consoles purely for their first party and more specifically mario games which are few and far between...😞

Ubisoft's place on the list got a chuckle out of me.

No surprise. Nintendo doesn't create software anymore. They are now an emulation company reliant on decade old games.

It shows that Nintendo made just a few games in the last years, and most of their games are remakes. Work hard to get a better position.

@BloodNinja

Big time coasting. They only have one system to focus on now and instead of the supposed windfall of games that would result we get scraps because they figured out that people will still throw them money when they put no effort in

Last year was not a good Nintendo-year. This year seems even worse. If Mario Golf doesn’t somehow get a perfect 100/100 score...

@BloodNinja They always do when they’re on top.

Nintendo were poor last year in my opinion. 1 or 2 saving graces but overall quite poor.
It was so poor last year I invested in Xbox.

I'm loving XBox.
To be fair though things looking better for nintendo this year so far.
Don't understand their 'buy now before they go' policy on games and merch?

@Nic-Noc20th-C I have had an Xbox me for a while now, but I have been giving it a lot more love. Considering getting either the Ps5 or series x when they become available if things don’t improve.

@Deljo I am the opposite. Except MK and Zelda I don't care for most first party games. I bought a lot of other games. That broad consumer base we are both a part of is why the Switch is so insanely successful.

@vyseofhr Excellent icon, by the way!

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I imagine Nintendo doesn't give a flying f*ck about this. The bottom line is looking really good.

@Stargazer Yep! Been saying the same thing along with others.

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@JohnnyC it must be frustrating for some developers.... Nintendo sells millions on old games, even a card game. Meanwhile, others put heart and soul into something fresh and don’t break a half million.

Not too much of a surprise. 2020 wasn’t a great year specifically for Nintendo software - unless, you know, you gauge it by something gamers shouldn’t care about, like sales.

Annapurna, though - what a time they’ve been having. Whoever is picking projects to publish there has got one heck of an eye.

@BloodNinja I was happier with Nintendo's output last year than in 2018, personally, so I don't know that I'd agree with your assessment.

@rockodoodle

I have series S.

Game pass and next gen on a budget.
It's difficult to beat especially if use the the big screen mostly.

@Ralizah I’m looking at the over all, big picture. On a user by user basis, you’re going to see varying levels of happiness and disappointment, depending on which games were released. Overall, they are coasting as a company, putting in bare minimum financial investment and relying on popularity to succeed. Good for new users, good for business, bad for long time fans looking for innovation.

Metacritic is an aggregator. You don't "listen" to it; you just use it as a gateway for the actual reviews. There's a valid discussion to be had about exactly which reviews are aggregated. And it's certainly problematic how Metacritic tries to homogenize the rating systems of a variety of media under a 1-100 scale. But it doesn't have opinions of its own and there's nothing scientific about it, in the sense that it doesn't reveal the "true" quality of anything. It's useful for picking up the pulse of the overall critical response. Which isn't a minor thing and I find it very interesting.

maybe if Nintendo did more than 90% lazy overpriced ports, they'd score higher?

Am I really missing the big picture? I mean...what games did SEGA actually make that are worth the whole of last year?!?

@BloodNinja and you APPROVE of this?

Wow, fam, V disappointed

@matdub fair comment, for multi platform games I'll go ps or xbox but I never miss a nintendo console as I couldn't not play the latest mario game. It's a shame because my switch gets little or no use unfortunately

@electrolite77 🥱 I do ignore that shovelware

@Cikoltan agree 100%

@a1904

Nope, SEGA had a great year beyond just P5 Royal. They also had 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 and Yakuza Like a Dragon.

Yakuza 0 came out years ago. Like A Dragon was last years release.

@BloodNinja Relying on popularity to succeed as opposed to... what?

Nintendo is the most consistent publisher between the three major entities in the industry when it comes to published releases. You not liking what they're publishing, or critics having a preference for RPGs and the sort of action-adventure experiences that Sony almost exclusively seems to specialize in now, is beside the point.

But that is what it is. What I'm primarily rejecting is this notion that Nintendo put in a lot of effort into their release schedule in 2017/2018 and then took the last two years off. In reality, with Switch, they alternate between years with more support and years with weaker support. 2018 and 2020 were both off-years for Nintendo. 2019 was better than either, and second only to 2017.

If you want to see what a company coasting on tiny games and remasters really looks like, I'd invite you to look at a list of the PS4's first-party releases from 2013 - 2016. Even the Switch's 2018 looks pretty damn good next to PS4's 2014 on the first-party front.

Do the people saying Nintendo is coasting right now even realize that

1. Games these days can can take a while to make usually a couple years at best

2. We are currently in the middle of a major pandemic which of course likely threw a lot of their release schedule out of wack

@Nic-Noc20th-C I have a lot of discs and DVDs. I want to use it as an entertainment hub. I wish Game pass was around a few years ago before I started hoarding games

I wonder why people take this site seriously still. With all the review bombing that goes on this site is hardly more respectable than a random blog.

@Ralizah Thank you for pointing this out. Seems like a lot of people slept on 2019 when it was one of nintendos best years in history; not as good as 2017 but darn close.

The issue as you highlighted is that nintendo publishes a lot of games across many genres and this leaves many gamers who want your bog-standard AAA experiences feeling cold. Sony's recent strategy has been to dial in on games that hit the largest demographic possible, but for people like myself that enjoy variety its caused me to be less compelled to play my playstation.

Don't get me wrong, I still love playstation and spend a lot of time on that machine but Sony isn't exactly outputting the same kind of wacky release schedules like nintendo's summer 2019 which saw: mario maker 2, ultimate alliance 3, three houses, Astral chain and daemon ex machina; five games that couldn't be more different from one another.

@RushDawg I love all of those but I'm pretty sure P5R was the highest rated game on Metacritic last year

If Persona 5 Royal was released on a Nintendo system people would complain it's a port of a 1 year old game released with too little new content and at full price and it would have never gotten the score it got on PS4. Nintendo is competiting with megacorps much bigger than them while having their hands tied. So what they're achieving is admirable.

People complain about enhanced Wii U ports on Switch, then immediately praise the enhanced PS4/PS3 port on PS4 as the highest-rated game of 2020.

LOL

I think Nintendo really got bumped down by releasing some titles that would never review well.

Like the Fire Emblem: Dark Dragon. a clunky NES game was always going to bump them down a bit and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon which is notorious for getting really bad reviews even when the game is good.

It reminds me of whenever Mario Party comes out and despite essentially being the genre defining party game, it gets like 6/10 or 7/10 on average.

@BloodNinja Funny how folks will go "this doesn't mean anything!!!" and then see a game get reviewed with a score of 7/10 (good) and click their tongue and go "WELL, THAT'S NOT AS GOOD AS IT COULD BE, SO I'LL SAVE MY MONEY."

@electrolite77 LOLZ why count? There's like 3 good original Nintendo games and they are all from 2017.

Yakuza 0 and P5R were amazing. Isn't Yakuza 0 older? I just played it on PS4.

Every year after 2017 has been a disappointment, for gaming in general, and for Nintendo.

75 for what is considered by many a "terrible year for Nintendo" is actually still good. Nintendo's year was slow, but they did have an amazing 2019.

Also, Sony ranking in at 79, only four points higher than Nintendo is rather disappointing for them. They released two titles in the GotY running and the Demon Souls remake which got decent reviews I thought.

It's very rare that I keep a Nintendo published game, I haveso few in my collections but I find a lot of them to be just fine or like Luigi's Mansion 3, I loved it until it became a chore. I miss that "magic" those games had but I am hopefuly that whenever Breath of the Wild sequel comes out that has that same magic.

"At Nintendo, this is a transition year...."

@westman98 Don't be silly, it's the remade PS3 port that gets all the GotY praise.

@Ralizah What exactly did Nintendo release in 2020 other than the highly profitable but highly divisive ACNH, and a paper mario they shadow dropped with minimal fanfare? A Pikmin and 3D mario port. A retro mario collection. Was Xenoblade remaster last year? I guess that counts.

Whether they're coasting or whether they're witholding everything for a soft-relaunch with "Switch Pro" that was supposedly supposed to happen in late 2020 but got derailed by world events, I'm not sure. But it wasn't a particularly meaningful year. And most of the big stuff coming up (and there's a fair bit) is third party, exclusive or not. I can't imagine Nintendo's doing nothing, but they're holding onto their cards for "something" be it a sales slump or new hardware.

@NEStalgia Sorry to tell you, but there's nothing "highly divisive" about the new Animal Crossing. Almost everyone loves it. It's a cultural phenomenon.

The new Paper Mario IS divisive... for the wrong reasons, IMO. It was a really solid release. Probably my second favorite new game of 2020 after FF7R.

They also published Age of Calamity. It was technically developed primarily by Koei-Tecmo, but with heavy involvement by Nintendo, so it's kind of a Bloodborne situation. That's a solid release

Clubhouse Games... eh. It has its fans, but it's not for me.

Then you get the upgraded ports. Pikmin 3 Deluxe, TMS #FE Encore, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, etc. Most people didn't own a Wii U, so it's nice that Pikmin and TMS got a new chance at success, even if they both ended up getting largely ignored again.

Xenoblade Chronicles DE enjoyed a significant visual overhaul, new QoL fixes, and an entirely brand new chapter, so it counts as a new release in the same way that something like Persona 5 Royal does.

On the DLC side, there were expansions for Pokemon Sw/Sh and Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

There were probably other, smaller things they also released, but that's all that comes to mind for 2020.

Is that a mind-blowing first-party year? Not really. It's definitely one of the weaker Switch years. But it's solid enough. There's a diverse mix of new releases and re-releases.

As for 2021... yeah, I dunno. Amazing year, but that's almost entirely down to muscular third-party support, with exclusives releasing almost every month. Really odd for third parties to carry a Ninty console like this. Which might be why we're not seeing a ton of first-party stuff this year: what's the point in competing with and overshadowing third-party exclusives on your platform? Better to save that ammunition for next year.

@Ralizah It's a cultural phenomenon and commercial success. It's divisive all the same. Same as can be said about TLoU2. You're on the divided side of the line, you know that. Other than the cute charming world, I can't find much TO love about that game....and I'm an superfan of the series.

Paper Mario, yeah, I know there's issues with that, I still haven't opened my copy....next few weeks probably. I expect I'll love it. AoC...honestly I don't love that. And Musou never gets top reviews, so I can't see that really having helped their rating. It's not bad, it's just....well...Musou...and so repetitive. If it weren't BotW themed, reception would have been more mixed.

Ports ports ports....DLC...ugh. WiiU's specter haunts Switch and drags it down. If you didn't own a WiiU I'm sure Switch looks great, and I know that's most people. But we're the people that did. And Switch is horribly bleak these years as a reuslt. It's a console that actively punishes people who bought the prior one by offering little that's new. The coming year looks better, but at the moment, I'm pretty unhappy with Switch. It went from sitting in pole position to become favorite console of all time to "eh...I guess it's ok. I use it sometimes. Is it next gen yet?"

As you say, 2021 looks great, but none of that has anything to do with Nintendo, really, and most of it has to do with the 3DS third party reinforcements arriving to bring up the rear. If the third parties bring the Nintendo exclusives like they did for 3DS, we're in good shape. Some of 3DS's best years featured little from Nintendo.

As long as we don't repeat that god-forsaken animal wasteland game that "everybody" loves except the people that actually love the series.

Doesn't Nintendo publish more games than the top 5 put together? I mean, it's not a fair comparison. Sega publishes like 4 games a year and Sony puts out one game every 16 months. LMAO.

@AuburnGamer Metacritic has 2 useful things to have a rough idea of a game's quality: the average score and the amount of good, average and bad reviews. It is still a lot more reliable than a single, often very subjective review. Keep in mind that the average score is around 75, so a score below 70 is to be considered bad and 80 just above average.

@OdnetninAges I KNOW!!! Hilarious lmao!!

NINJA APPROVED

@Ralizah As opposed to innovating and continuing to push the hardware to its limit. Instead, they are relying on reputation, which is good for business, bad for people looking for innovation.

@GannonBanned I may just be approving my ability to type a mildly coherent comment 😅

@JohnnyC If Super Mario 3D is your game of the year, then Nintendo, and other publishers, have greatly failed.

@Chamver Umm....they put out a whole lot more than 4, and definitely offer a wider genre of games than Nintendo.

@Ghost_of_Hasashi Sega really do not suck, they offer a huge variety of games considered to be amongst the best in their genre.

@a1904 another comment from someone who really has no idea regarding Sega's diverse range of titles.

Nice to see Sega at the top of a list for a positive reason. haven't seen that for years

@electrolite77 so I see you still are hoping Nintendo will gift you a real jet ski for supporting their complete non efforts with comments. So glad you count up all the cruddy games that get put out. Not going to pretend Age of Calamity isn't a broken mess or Origami King isn't a weak text adventure. Nintendo's new quality software is currently at zero and NUMBERS don't lie...Nintendo makes no quality new games for anyone. Enjoy your POS skyward sword port...

@NEStalgia I didn't own a Wii U and yet my Switch is collecting dust these days. 2020 still had a few indies and 2018/19-released games which were of interest to me, but now the well seems to have run dry. Probably an indie at the level of Hades or Dead Cells or the BotW sequel will wake me up. Probably this is why Nintendo had posted that tweet last year - charge your Switch at least once every six months.

PS: IMO the biggest problem with Nintendo these days is that if you are not interested in the specific series or titles they are releasing at that moment, you don't really have anything to look forward to. I understand that they don't want to cannibalise their games by releasing too many, but still it's not exactly helpful for the players, especially the picky ones. For example, if you weren't interested in Smash, 2018 would have been quite dry, if you weren't interested in Animal Crossing or Paper Mario or Pikmin, another dry year.

@F1R3F1Y It's a subjective assessment based on what I personally enjoyed the most last year. Objectively is it the best package released last year? Of course not.

@JohnnyC just seems a shame that your game of the year is one of many re-release cash grabs from nintendo.

@F1R3F1Y Apologies that it was the release I enjoyed the most from 2020. I haven't played all the games released in 2020 (haven't got the time or the money to do so), but of the ones I did that was the one I liked best. Last of Us 2, Animal Crossing and Star Wars Squadrons were also excellent and kept me busy and entertained, but playing through Mario Galaxy and Mario 64 is a pleasure that few other games can match.

@JohnnyC Of course they are good games...but when you look at these games objectively,they should not be priced comparatively with new AAA releases. These kinds of games should be part of Nintendo Online service. when I see the games available on Xbox Gamepass, and even Sony, who are improving free included games, Nintendo just seems to be so out of touch.

@F1R3F1Y My comment and the article aren't about the pricing of games, but the quality of them and - as far as I'm concerned when rating a game - how enjoyable they are. In that respect Mario Galaxy alone still has few direct rivals and the opportunity to play with traditional controls has been a fantastic improvement. If we're ranking things by perceived value for money then I agree Nintendo automatically loses on all fronts as Sony and Microsoft offer numerous fantastic AAA games each year with their subscription services, and have significantly better sales where you can pick up excellent titles for less than £20.

@JohnnyC Perhaps a lot of my frustration is with the fact I feel hugely let down by what was an incredibly promising first couple of years on the Switch. I don't buy a new console to play shinier versions of 10-year-old games....and if they do get released, I expect them to be priced accordingly.

Wow so many Nintendo fans in denial.....a bit sad guys it’s not the first time Sega has given Nintendo a run for thier money, good to see Sega back on top.....sorry to say it but “Sega does what Nintendon’t” in 2020, Deal with it 😂 ah feels like the 90’s again......

It's also looking more likely that the Switch will not have an exclusive MarioKart, Metroid or Zelda in its entire lifespan.

@wiiada I’m so surprised at how U MAD these Nindy people are being, and I say that as a diehard Nintendo fanboy who hasn’t bought a Sega game in years - it’s just ratings, people - you still like what you like

@AuburnGamer "Is anyone still paying any attention to Metacritic?"

I avoid anything below an 80 and everything over 85 is a must-buy. Works for me!

@San_D LOL, that's a good, and hilarious point about the 6-month charge reminder!

But yeah, I think that's really the issue with Nintendo's current strategy. They define the "game of the year" that every customer is supposed to buy and play, just as Steve Jobs used to tell everyone which new feature defined the new phone and everyone was supposed to want to use that app and get excited for how that feature could be worked to fit into their lives. As you said, if that game of the year doesn't do it for you, they don't give you much of anything else to look forward do. And they don't mind this because the game of the year seems to be something of "generally universal appeal" that has "enough" customer base that it doesn't matter trying to cater to anyone outside its bubble.

2017 was a partial year, and was great. I know I've said in other threads, 3DS is my favorite system of all time, managing to best SNES. In 2017 Switch was on a bullet train to replacing it in short order. And then it derailed. 2018 was dead. 2019 was actually half-dead. People praise 2019 but the first half had nothing. It was back-loaded with some great games, across a variety of genres. The pacing was strange. 1.5 years of nothing, and then a huge dump of games. Though I strongly believe that most of those games were WiiU games that got converted to Switch at the last minute (Luigi's Mansion 2, the devs during the E3 play commentary actually slipped and admitted as much, comparing one of the features being demonstrated to the "WiiU version" - lol. I'm betting FE3H was WiiU too.)

Then 2020....just ACNH and Paper Mario. A good Paper Mario perhaps. ACNH is painful though. It's praised is this greatest of all games affair. As a big AC fan, to me I see it as a travesty of a release that decimates what made the series good. Another lost year to me. So far Switch was 2/3 great year (2017), 1.5 years dead, then a glut of games all at once, then another year dead. I loved it at launch, then I loved it late 2019. And then it's just kind of there in between. Though the first few years of PS4 didn't feel much better.

We're getting to a good time again, but it's all about 3rd party now...not much from Nintendo at all. Switch won't collect dust the next 6 months for sure, but Nintendo gets no credit for that.

BUT, I'm surprised you as a non-WiiU owner are finding it as dull. You got Pikmin 3 and 3D World this year.... Those were good games when they were new. And the common defense of Switch around here is that Nintendo releases tons of games....as long as you hadn't played them before on WiiU. Which is kind of true. I'm not sure re-releasing the games from a failed console on the next console like a hard reset and just casting off the customers that were there last time is solid long-term business (it's great short-term business), but at least the lineup is a bit more abundant for you. If Sony just re-released the Vita games and little else on PS5 for the next year and a half, I can't imagine Push Square would be awash in praise how PS5 is amazing as long as you didn't own a Vita, and nobody did.

@electrolite77 I agree with you on the Sony front. At this point Nintendo seems to have abandoned the existing audience to go chase a casual mobile-oriented market. And Sony has abandoned it's traditional audience to go chase a casual movie-focused audience.

In both cases they've basically cast aside the traditional "gamer" that has made up their market for decades to go chase this big new mainstream (you could say, "casual" but I think "mainstream/pop-culture" is a better term) audience that has very different tastes. Largely, tastes we actively rejected and sought alternatives to, and found in gaming until now. Sony and Nintendo are very disappointing echoes of each other now. As a "traditional" gamer, my tastes and wants are inherently unaligned with mainstream tastes...that's why I've played games for 30+ years instead of movies and TV. For both companies to basically just walk away from that table to chase the mainstream that doesn't engage us leaves a pretty big void. And is reminiscent of the Wii where Nintendo basically walked away from their traditional gaming market to chase a new one. But back then they also had DS/3DS to cater to gamers as well. This time, it's the mainstream or nothing. And Sony just joined in this time.

At the moment the result is both Sony and Nintendo feel like "second consoles" this time around, and I'm mostly looking toward what MS is doing. With their consolidation of the WRPG titans other than Bioware and CDPR that just shot themselves in both feet, they seem like the last company left that's focusing on traditional gamers as their primary market. (for now...)

@F1R3F1Y I bought Series X to play shinier versions of 10 year old games. It's just that the upgrades are free if you already own the 10 year old version if them....

What first few promising years of Switch though? 2017 was promising, and then 2018 through until July 2019 fell flat. After the late 2019 bump it's been flat ever since again. It's dead most of the time, it just twitches with signs of life now and again. It's like WiiU, except people bought it and 3rd parties are thankfully starting to fill the void where that never happened on WiiU. Nintendo's always been my #1, but every time they find a popular console they just go into idle mode and collect the cash. The cycle was forgivable with Wii. Understandable with WiiU's failure.... But now it's getting old.

@NEStalgia Yeah I agree with most of your points, but 3D world doesn't work for me due to the time limited levels. Pikmin I may buy on a sale, but the demo was kinda okay, nothing mind-blowing in my opinion. Age of calamity again was hype but the story elements kinda left me cold. The number of times I'm typing "kinda" in this message is indicative I believe - nothing among the current roster really really captivates me like BotW or Three Houses, which are objectively my favourite Switch games from Nintendo. Sony is a different story though, I never liked their first party efforts, seem too Hollywood-wannabe for my tastes, so never owned a Sony console except a PSP - you get the idea.

@NEStalgia Yeah, that is where Microsoft actually truly wins over Nintendo. They recognize the value of their back-catalogue, not as a way to fleece new customers for games they have already bought once or more times, but actually as an incentive to purchase their new hardware. The Switch barely has any real top quality exclusive big budget games from Nintendo....and instead, a bunch of stuff that can be played on previous console generations.

@San_D Haha, yeah, I hear you. Pikmin 3 actually was fantastic (assuming the genre etc works for you) - but the problem it has is that it's too short. It felt rushed. Once you feel like you're out of the tutorial and into the game, it just.....ends....suddenly. I know there's the argument of replayability, but while true, I don't feel like the SNES design of tiny games that you replay and hone over and over really works as well in the modern age. At least not at AAA pricing. What is there is brilliant, there's just too little of it. And AoC...yeah. I can see why it's popular to a point, it's a good game overall, but it's still just a heavily customized Musou, and nowhere on the order of P5 Strikers. And I don't get the level of hype it has other than that A: Nintendo had no other games for the holiday and B: Cutscenes that continue BotW. It's a $60 prologue for a different, better game.

And same about Sony - they actually did have some good first party stuff, but they've closed most of the studios that made it and funneled the money into more Hollywood. Yep, I think we're pretty much coming from the same place regarding tastes. Unless you think New Horizons is a transcendental experience....

@F1R3F1Y Yeah, I'm really hoping that mentality sticks with MS for the long term. On the one hand, I know the industry sees a back catalogue as a liability. Allegedly they all have the player data that shows players don't really interact with old content that much, just new stuff, and MS had to pull it out of their hat as a gimmick because they needed something to salvage the ailing X1. They could ditch it if it becomes too costly for too little use by players. On the other hand it's worked so well for them, and with Sony apparently killing the PS3 & Vita stores, fate of purchased games unknown, it's a huge differentiator. And a natural fit for them since they're connecting Xbox to Windows very heavily, and infinite BC has always been a staple of the PC mentality, so it's more of a continuation of where they've always been.

I have mixed feelings about where Switch is in terms of exclusives. It doesn't feel like there's been that many. But as I list them, there's much more than it feels like there are. As a number it's not bad (and I'm excluding the B-tier stuff like 1-2-Sw, the board games collection, etc: From where we are now, if we are to slightly assume Botw2, Splatoon 3, MP4, may or may not arrive on the Switch 1, Switch's major AAA platform titles are: Odyssey, FE3H, XC2& Torna, Astral Chain (not a tentpole yet, but it could become one), Bayo 3 (Kamiya's pretty much come short of saying it's done but Nintendo's waiting to release it.) I guess Sw/Sh counts, and Arceus will count. Pokemon Snap, Arms, Splatoon 2, Smash U. Crafted World. Luigi's Mansion 2. And that excludes the ports and "enhanced" versions - XC1 Remaster may count as that's a pretty heavy remaster bordering more toward remake. SMM2. I may have even forgotten one or two.

When you read that list, that's actually a lot of games in 4 years. But what went wrong is they were all clustered together. 2 batches in 2017. One batch in late 2019. And mostly idle the rest of the time. And the other problem is many of these aren't really "AAA" games. Some are $60 games that feel more like indies than complete retail releases. It's weird. In print, there's a lot of games. But somehow it just doesn't feel that way. Probably because the majority of those were from 2017 and then it just kind of slowed after that first year to a trickle save for Fall 2019.

MHR, MHS, SMT3, SMTV, Rune Factory 5. Some good exclusive stuff coming... Ys9 (PS & Sw), but Nintendo's doing........a re-release of a Wii game, plus Pokesnap. First party is definitely dormant, and most of those big games were obviously started as WiiU games that moved to Switch. It feels like once they got those out the door they started moving all new development to the next console.

And that's were Switch, for WiiU owners falls the flattest. Switch feels more like WiiU ProX - the mid-gen hardware refresh of WiiU, than its own platform. Except it doesn't have BC....with itself....

So many responses here that look like salty fanboys sticking their fingers in their ears... smh

No need to cast aspersions on metacritic just because you personally don't like the results of this ranking. It's a plain and simple fact that other publishers released better rated games in 2020 compared to Nintendo. If you're old enough to comment on the internet, you should be mature enough to deal with it.

@NEStalgia I'd like to see that parallel universe where New Horizons doesn't get released with a pandemic, probably would still sell well, but I doubt it would be this big. The only thing transcendental about it is its sales.

2020 was a good year for me as a Nintendo fan personally. This year is looking to also be an expensive one.

@GannonBanned Yeah I’m a huge Nintendo fan, but a bigger Sega fan, and is Sega fans have suffered for years, it really was about time SEGA returned to making quality products. I think a strong SEGA is great for the industry and great for Nintendo, they do work together quite a lot these days and if Nintendo can bury the hatchet and work with an old foe, then Ninty fans should be happy about SEGA’s success last year. You all own a switch right? If Nintendo isn’t going to give you the best they can at least SEGA can, and you can play SEGA on switch so it’s win win for Sega, Sega fans and Nintendo fans. Nintendo unfortunately phoned in last year and that’s just a fact. I would love to see Sega and Nintendo in first and second place just like the old days. I expect Nintendo may be developing in secret for their possible console (Switch Pro) which would explain how quiet it has been on the Nintendo front last year (and this year). They will be saving their heavy hitters for the next console launch I expect......