Ubisoft Montreal dethrones Nintendo in our developer chart

While Nintendo may have reigned for all of 2007, their top spot on the March edition of our monthly developer chart has finally fallen to another studio – Ubisoft Montreal.

Buoyed by the success of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, the studio has shot seven places up our chart, which is extrapolated from ChartTrack’s world-renowned sales data based on revenues generated during March by games sold at UK retail – the third largest software market in the world.

Nintendo instead drops to third place, with Brain Training still it’s most popular title on the shelves, pipped to second place by Sega, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games getting a second lease of life (not that the first showed any signs of extinguishing any time soon) now that the DS version has been tardily released. The irony that Sega has beaten Nintendo with a game partly based on Nintendo’s IP and released solely on Nintendo’s platforms doesn’t need to be pointed out – although, come to think of it, that’s exactly what we’ve just done.

Biggest climber this month is EA Montreal, which has vaulted a staggering 116 places into fourth position on the back of Army of Two, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Develop favorite Office Create sneaking into 18th place now in under the new name of Cooking Mama Limited.

But the real trend this month is new entries, with four companies joining the chart for the first time in a while. Polyphony leads the pack in ninth place riding on Gran Turismo 5 Prologue’s coat-tails, while Bully: Scholarship Edition helps Mad Doc (this month purchased by Rockstar and renamed as Rockstar New England) into tenth place. Kaos follows in at 11th, while Mistwalker and Feelplus bring up the rear at 14th thanks to Lost Odyssey.

To see the chart in full, click here.