Games are a global business. After all, how many other industries could I work in where I live in Australia, work for an American-based company and can be read by anyone from Portugal to the Philippines at the push of a button? Not many. So it’s a shame that while information about games is truly global, the games themselves are not.

It’s a sad fact that most publishers just can’t keep up with the 21st century. Consoles, games, console services like Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network are advertised globally, on globally-read sites, and yet their actual distribution is delayed not just by translation, but by 20th-century ideas like staggered market regions and country-specific licensing deals. Which in the end means lots of people gets lots of games a lot later than other people.

It sucks. You hate it, I hate it, we all (especially the Europeans among us) hate it. So I figured it’d be interesting to take a look at the industry’s biggest publishers, look at their biggest games from the past two to three years, and see which companies are doing a good job of satisfying global demand for their product, and which ones…aren’t.