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Originally posted by: ruby_onix
Personally, I believe the term "second party" is fiction, a media buzzword that only exists in our heads.
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Originally posted by: mouse_clicker
How is it a media buzzword, ruby?
The term "second party" doesn't seem to exist anywhere except videogames. And it only came around in the late SNES days, when Nintendo hooked up with Rare.
Here's how I see it. Nintendo is the first party. They make the hardware. They make the games that play on the hardware. They make the controllers, and stuff like that. Now then, if you get tired of having a system that's "100% Nintendo", you can go to a "third party" and get some "enhancements" to mix it up and make it more interesting.
Nintendo is the first party,
you're the second party (of course, the term "user" is more common), and whoever else you involve is the third party.
Rare wasn't Nintendo. So Rare was a third party. Sure, Nintendo appeared to be in charge of them and could boss them around, but at it's heart, Rare was the Stamper Brothers, not Nintendo.
The current Rare is Microsoft. They were bought up 100%, and are just a "team name" within Microsoft now, so they're part of a first party.
Silicon Knights and Retro aren't Nintendo. They've got cozy arrangements, but they're still their own bosses. So they're third parties.
Square's a third party (or should I say Square/Enix). They got up and left for Sony while Nintendo owned a chunk of them, and now they're going multi-platform while Sony owns a chunk of them.
I have no clue about the status of Hal, especially since it's founder is now the president of Nintendo. I'm kind of thinking that Hal actually "pulled a Kirby" and swallowed/absorbed Nintendo. (>")> (>")> (>")>
Unlike other markets, videogame software
needs third party assistance. The first parties can't cover everything. So third parties are more and more important.
When the industry started finding third parties willing to provide the first parties with serious ammunition, a reliable source of top-notch games that were console-exclusive, the first parties knew that they needed a new name for these "valued third parties", since almost every first party in the world likes to point out and make people understand that "third parties" are inferior to "first parties".
So when Nintendo hooked up with Rare and the Stampers, they coined the term (or someone else smaller used it, I can't really tell) "second party". Something halfway between a first and second party, mathamatically speaking.
Since the SNES days, people have been trying to pin down the exact meaning of "second party". The most common one I've heard is that it's a company with some degree of ownership by the first party, and an exclusivity contract. But the ownership factor is irrelevant, since we've seen a few times that anything less that 50% doesn't really count toward anything serious. And contracts are everywhere. The modern industry is built on them. We most likely don't even know about half of them, and most of us outside of Rick haven't ever seen the details of
any of them.
On PS2 message boards lately I've seen another definition pop up (probably since Sony is looser with their pens and tighter with their paper shredders than any companies we've seen before, and almost all of their games are made by someone else). "Any game that's
published by the first party is a game made by a second party, even if they only held that position for a short while." Is that really a bad definition? It eliminates some of the confusion. All you have to do is look for a logo on the box.
And it has the side effect of us being able to say that Square is a second party of Nintendo again, while they stopped being a Sony second party when they hooked up with EA five years ago. ^_^
Since the SNES days, we've constantly been surprised by the actions of "second parties", and asked "How can they do that? Weren't they a second party?" They do what they do because they're third parties. They're not Nintendo (or Sony, or Microsoft), they're someone else. Every second party is really a third party, and you have to look at them one-by-one to understand them and not be surprised by their actions.
People can easily say that the likes of Factor 5 and Camelot and Treasure are closer to Nintendo than some "second parties", and more deserving of the term. And since nobody can provide a dictionary definition of "second party" (aside from the occasional IGN Mailbag where someone like Fran says "I thought it was common knowlege, oh well, here's what it means") since it's exclusively used by the videogame software industry, I can't stop anyone from changing their "personal definition" of the term to include those companies.
Topic: Camelot and Factor 5 (Read 7474 times)
