By Joe Keiser
http://www.next-gen.biz/

To arrive at this list of the top 12 game development houses in Europe, we have weighted studios based on product sales and revenue in both the United States and Europe, using a variey of resources including available market research data. We have also taken the critical response to each studio’s products over 2006 and 2007, gathering that data from review score aggregate sites. In addition, we have predicted each studio’s future performance potential, based both on past performance and announced but unreleased products. This has not resulted in a purely scientific analysis, so some of the positioning on the list is also based on good old-fashioned intuition.

We have given each studio a point score based on the result of the analysis – the top rated studio on the list is worth 50 points, the number two studio 49 points, and so on. We have summed these points based on the developer’s home country, creating a leaderboard of the top European nations in the game industry. We present this leaderboard in the spirit of friendly international competition!

1.    England – 887 Points
2.    France – 109 Points
3.    Scotland – 77 Points
4.    Sweden – 58 Points
5.    Germany – 51 Points
6.    Denmark – 37 Points
7.    The Netherlands – 16 Points
8.    Ukraine – 12 Points
9.    Norway – 9 Points
10.    Romania – 8 Points
11.    Finland – 7 Points
12.    Russia – 4 Points

It is worth noting is that a lot of development houses may have studios across Europe or the world, or may have the primary corporate office in the United States but primary creative talent in Europe. In these cases we only considered where the creative talent was, and considered internal studios as individual entities if such delineations were clear. Only in cases where studio development was incredibly global and decentralized did we consider the corporate office the studio home as well.