Isildur´s Heir;17081167 said:
You call it 2nd party, i call it 3rd party partners, but it´s the same deal (to tell the truth, i never heard of them being called 2nd party, but that´s cool).
They are the perfect example of it, and yes, MS doesn´t own anything of Valve, but the deal is more or less the same, more even when, i believe (and after Gabe saying that about the PS3) that The Orange Box was the first and last of their games on the PS3.
No it isn't. They are nowhere near the same deal.
With 2nd Party developers like Bungie, Insomniac, Media Molecule, HAL Laboratory, Robot Entertainment, GameFreak and Sucker Punch, they hold publishing and funding deals with Sony and Microsoft and are essentially developing exclusively for those consoles because they have long standing business ties with those companies. Most of the IPs they work on like Halo, Ratchet & Clank, Resistance, inFamous, Pokemon, Kirby, LittleBigPlanet, and Sly Cooper are owned by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft most of the time.
Then you have 3rd Party developers like Kojima Productions, High Voltage Software, and Valve where the people in charge decide that they want to develop their games exclusively for whatever reason. However, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft do not fund or publish these games. They have other companies like Konami, Sega, or Electronic Arts to do it for them. They do not own the IPs to those games developed and they can do whatever they want with them as evident in Konami deciding to have Metal Gear Solid: Rising multiplatform and Valve outsourcing the port job of The Orange Box to EA UK.
But even if it isn´t, a 3rd party as no real obligation to only make games for one console alone, look at Level 5 for example, which only makes games for Sony when it comes to home consoles, but as several on the DS, hell, they were even going to make a Xbox game last gen, but it got cancelled (True Fantasy Online).
The reason why True Fantasy Online got cancelled was that Microsoft screwed the pooch so badly on that one that Level-5 refuses to make another game for them again. And Level-5 really isn't the best example to bring up because they do a lot of work on their own IPs like Professor Layton on the Nintendo DS and the IPs of others like Square-Enix's Dragon Quest, Sony's Dark Cloud. They both publish their own games and have others do it for them. It's sorta confusing.
The best examples of second party developers are Sony's Insomniac Games, Sucker Punch Productions, and Media Molecule, Microsoft's Bungie, Ruffian Games, and Robot Entertainment, and Nintendo's Game Freak, HAL Laboratory, and Camelot.