Recently, Gamasutra, the well-known website of global developers, has selected the top 10 game developers of 2020 all over the world. The list includes game giants like Nintendo and Blizzard Entertainment, as well as several independent game studios.

Blizzard Entertainment

Even though it was a quieter year release-wise for Blizzard Entertainment, the company have a robust transition to work-from-home in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Blizzard reappropriated its office supplies for employees to take home, and it delayed World of Warcraft: Shadowlands’ launch. What’s more, it punted BlizzCon out a few more months into an online format.

Blizzard’s process for managing the pandemic's impact on its employees is commendable, and may inform how other major companies navigate future crises.

EA Motive

Since its inception 5 years ago, EA Motive has been facing an identity crisis for a long time. Is it a new intellectual property factory for EA? Is it a Star Wars support studio? While corporate HQ worked behind the scenes to figure out what to do with the Montreal-based company, its developers took the ball into their own hands and ran with it all the way to the release of Star Wars Squadrons.

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Star Wars Squadrons is a flight sim with MOBA influences, whose contents are not as abundant as the other flagship games (with In-App Purchase and online service) of EA. Its developer design the game in order to show their passion for Star War, and to show their respect for that category of PC game in 1990s.

The Game Band

The Game Band launched Where Cards Fall with Apple Arcade. It seemed like a studio with a similar identity to other great indies: it made great, beautiful puzzle games for casual platforms. Six months later, they blasted people’s expectations away with the creation of Blaseball, a game that is somehow baseball, but not baseball, but is still baseball, but is actually pure chaos.

Blaseball captures players’ interests with its funny and unique game play. It brings people together with joy and happiness when people can only stay at home working.

Hello Games

Since launching No Man’s Sky in 2016, Hello Games has matured into a studio that has mastered live-service development.

As an independent game, No Man’s Sky was once criticized by a minority of players for being low quality, but Hello Games continued to plug away in a bid to make No Man's Sky bigger and better. 2020 saw the UK studio roll out some mammoth updates including Origins which added deeper planetary diversity, new terrain, more expansive weather conditions, binary star systems, colossal buildings, a reworked UI, titanic sand worms, and much, much more. And it wins “Best Ongoing Game” of TGA.

Innersloth

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Last year, Innersloth’s social deduction game Among Us became so insanely popular that the studio had to cancel its sequel.

Among Us is one of the best choices for friends to play together at home, even though it was launched 2 years ago. In October last year, progressive politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez use live streaming to play the game on twitter to bring people together and spread messages of hope.

It's worth pointing out that Innersloth had to work tirelessly to ensure it didn’t waste the opportunity presented by Among Us’ second-year surge, and in the space of a few months the studio had increased the maximum player base, added four servers and three new regions, implemented color-blind support for specific tasks, etc.