October 01, 2004 - What are the best game publishers in the land? That's the question asked for the second year now by Game Developer Magazine, which in its October 2004 issue announced its Top 20 Publishers list for the year.

Unlike the publication's inaugural list last year, this time publishers were rated not just on brute revenue, but rather additionally taking into account factors such as use of third-party developers, average critical response to titles, percentage of original intellectual properties (IPs), and a survey of developer opinion of the publisher's practices.