Nintendo leads Metacritic’s 2026 roundup with an average score of 80.33

• Nintendo has nine qualifying first-party releases in the comparison, while PlayStation and Xbox each have six titles.
• The source excludes ports, DLC and remasters, but does include new remakes in the calculation.

What happened

A Metacritic roundup of first-party releases in 2026 puts Nintendo ahead of PlayStation and Xbox Game Studios. According to the comparison, Nintendo lands on an average critic score of 80.33 across nine qualifying games. That figure comes from a ranking that places the scores of first-party titles from Nintendo, Sony and Xbox Game Studios side by side.

PlayStation and Xbox each have six qualifying releases in the same calculation. The comparison only uses first-party titles and leaves out ports, DLC and remasters, while fully new remakes are included. That makes the selection narrower than a general year-end list, since only releases that the source counts as new first-party launches are included.

Among the Nintendo titles mentioned by the source are Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave and Pokemon Pokopia, both of which are said to sit at 89 on Metacritic. Other Nintendo games also reportedly score above 80, including several releases listed on Nintendo’s Metacritic company page for 2026. In external context, titles such as Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Nintendo Switch 2 Edition and Splatoon Raiders are also referenced, showing that the list includes multiple qualifying releases rather than just one or two standouts.

The comparison is based on critic scores, not user scores. That means the result depends on the Metacritic values available at the time of publication. The source does not provide a full title list for Nintendo, PlayStation or Xbox, so the 80.33 calculation cannot be fully verified from the summary alone. Even so, the external snippets line up with the main takeaway that Nintendo is ahead of its rivals in 2026.

Background

The comparison is based on Metacritic critic scores for first-party games from Nintendo, Sony and Xbox Game Studios. According to the source, ports, DLC and remasters are excluded, while new remakes are included. That matters because a remake can sometimes be treated as a re-release in other roundups, whereas this source counts it if it is a fully new remake.

The available summary does not list every Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox title. As a result, the 80.33 calculation cannot be fully checked using only this information. The external context does show that multiple Nintendo titles count toward the total in 2026, with the highest scores around 89 and other mentioned releases in the 80-plus range. That supports the conclusion that Nintendo’s lead is not based on a single outlier, but on a broader set of strong first-party releases.

There is also a small difference in presentation between the supplied context sources. One external summary states Nintendo’s average as 80.33, while another rounds the same result to 80. The core story remains the same, though: Nintendo comes out on top in this 2026 comparison. Because Metacritic scores can change as new reviews are added or if a title is updated in the database, the result depends on the publication date and the state of the database at that moment.

The source also does not mention user scores, sales figures or a wider platform comparison beyond first-party releases. So this is strictly a critic-score roundup within a defined game selection. Without the full dataset, the exact total behind Nintendo’s nine titles remains open to verification, but the available sources are consistent on the ranking and the averages cited.