The March 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine will detail the top 20 developers of 2007, and Nintendo will be the very first one on the list. The ranking comes from a study that Think Services' Game Developer magazine and Game Developer Research division put together, combining both sales data and a company's reputation to rank the top developers of last year.

Both criteria lead to Nintendo's Kyoto studios topping the charts. The company was praised in survey responses from the Gamasutra.com community for their unerring focus on product quality. This bore out as games like Wii Sports, Wii Play, and Nintendo's two Brain Age titles consistently showed up in top 10 sales charts not just in America, but in Japan and the UK as well. Additionally, Nintendo and the other developers were evaluated on their average Metacritic scores and the number of games they released in 2007 was taken into account as well.

The full list of 50 developers includes plenty of companies who've been at the forefront of news and game releases for 2007, like number two developer Infinity Ward and number three Blizzard Entertainment. But while Nintendo Kyoto took the number one spot, several other Nintendo-aligned studios are also on the list. Game Freak, the developers of Nintendo's handheld Pokemon Diamond and Pearl video games, appears at number seventeen. Hudson Soft, number nineteen, has developed Nintendo's wildly successful Mario Party franchise for eight consecutive iterations. Thanks to Super Mario Galaxy, the new Nintendo EAD Tokyo studio makes it on at number 23, and second-party Retro Studios also shows up at number 43 on the strength of Metroid Prime 3.

For a sample from the full report, and a table of contents listing all 50 developers in order,

>click here.