Gamasutra Name Their Top 10 Game Developers Of 2015

Respected online gaming publication Gamasutra has listed their top ten favourite video game developers of 2015. We’ve had some great games from a number of talented developers so it’s certainly interesting to see their picks. Nintendo fans will be glad to learn that Monolith Soft and Nintendo EPD have been listed along with the likes of Bethesda and Blizzard. Here’s their picks for the best game developers of 2015.

• Bethesda Game Studios
  

  We noticed something about Fallout 4 after it launched. We noticed the same thing a couple weeks after launch…and we continue to notice it a month later. People, across all different tastes and backgrounds are still talking about Fallout 4, and likely will be for the foreseeable future. The game is inescapable; its popularity hitting a kind of critical mass that has outdone most other, if not all, triple-A games this year.

  Bethesda-style RPGs already are inclined to provide emergent gameplay and personalized experiences, but throw in user-generated content, and launch it on multiple platforms that allow for easy game streaming, you get a thoroughly shareable game that finally feels like it’s at home.

• Blizzard Entertainment
  

  But beyond its market savvy, Blizzard deserves to be recognized for cultivating an environment where developers can work on a variety of projects with different scales, stakes, and design challenges. (…)
  Blizzard continues to experiment with new ideas and embrace popular shifts in the market while supporting its venerable franchises (and the developers who work on them), and for that we recognize it as a top developer of the year.

• Colossal Order
  

  We recognize Colossal Order as a standout developer of the year not just because it made a great city management game, but because it did so with less than 20 people, one-upping entrenched market leader SimCity in the process. The studio saw an opening, recognized there was an underserved audience, and capitalized on that fact brilliantly.

• Davey Wreden, Everything Unlimited, Ltd.
  

  With The Beginner’s Guide, Davey Wreden made a game that was ostensibly about game development, but it was in fact more purely about creating things and handing partial ownership of those things over to other people. It’s a game that walks the line between “about game development” and “about the existential crisis of a creator” and it often loses balance, finding itself on either side of that line at different points in time. It’s all deliberate and brilliantly authored, and it resonated strongly with game developers.

• Kojima Productions
  

  Here’s a doozy of a challenge for you: Take a beloved franchise, nearly two decades old, and known for its deep narrative and very specific style of handcrafted gameplay, and adapt it for the modern era of open-world games—without killing its soul or alienating its fans, and yet make it accessible and appealing to the players of today.

  The original 1998 Metal Gear Solid was itself a recapitulation of everything that made the first two 8-bit Metal Gear games into 1980s classics — but reinterpreted for the original PlayStation, in 3D, and with an entirely new form of creative expression.

  Metal Gear Solid V may not be as epoch-making as that game, but it does prove that things like a singular creative vision, handcrafted levels, and an eye for idiosyncratic detail can thrive in an open-world game. These were not settled questions, by any means. If this is Kojima’s last game for Konami, so be it — there can be no question it was executed with the care and creativity we’d expect.

• Moppin
  

  In a broader sense, Fumoto deserves to be recognized as an example of the sort of talent and creativity that’s brewing in the Japanese indie scene. His success this year with Downwell is a welcome one, and we look forward to seeing what he and his contemporaries do next.

• Monolith Soft
  

  The secret to understanding this it to consider that the “Xeno” series mastermind, Tetsuya Takahashi, has never lacked for ambition—though his reach, in the past, exceeded his grasp. Not so this time. It’s clear that it’s the simple result of careful planning, long development experience, and hard work.

  And if Xenoblade Chronicles X had a mission statement, it would be “show the world that the Japanese RPG can stand toe-to-toe with Western ones.” Outside of the struggling Final Fantasy series, there are so few examples of the genre that can truly be classified as triple-A; yet here’s a game that has a truly staggering breadth of content (including both passive and active online modes alongside a deep and long single-player campaign) and which can legitimately wear that moniker.

• Nintendo EPD
  

  Nintendo’s internal development studio hit hard this year with two standout titles that were, in many ways, polar opposites.

  Super Mario Maker may sound like a gimme, but realistically, to execute on this premise so well, it requires the patient craft of experienced developers and creative leadership who fully understand the soul of their own franchise.

  Few teams can make a bold, playable, and distinctive game in a new genre the first time they tackle it; few games have as strong an identity as Splatoon, and certainly almost none approach its quality from a design perspective.

  Pulling all of this together shows the formidable skill of Nintendo’s internal development teams, indeed.

• Psyonix
  

  In a year that saw many developers try their hands at emulating established successes, we recognize Psyonix for sticking with — and ceaselessly iterating on — a set of core concepts that it knew, internally, would make for a great game if brought together in just the right way. Such tenacity in itself is admirable, so much more so when it brings about a game like Rocket League that will be played and talked about for years to come.

• Tale of Tales
  

  Even if the studio never made another game, the fact would remain that Tale of Tales is a developer that inspired and influenced a modern design apparent in games like Gone Home from Fullbright and SOMA from horror game studio Frictional Games, among others. And those games, and games like them, will continue to reach and inspire ever more developers.

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