I've never head second party developer before. I would have guessed that it referred to customers, and they don't make any games that reach the attention of anyone else.
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's PlayOoh, I knew this one. Like said before, second-party are developer studios who do not own the consoles (like Nintendo or Sony) but still have a deal with a specific first-party developer.
Camelot's one, I think.
Stargate SG-1 Let's Watch. Because my ZHP thing failed.
Noodle Implements FTW!
Apparently so. That would also mean that, say, the Halo games ended up as second-party games as far as the Box with the X is concerned. Not that it makes much difference in how you perceive the game, though.
Videogames do not make you a worse person... Than you already are.I've been hearing "Second-party" for ages. I think I first heard it in relationship to Rareware in their Nintendo days.
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaNo, they're a subsidiary of Nintendo. As is Retro, which for some reason a lot of people don't get when they're clamoring for Metroid to get outsourced "again".
Insomniac is an example used in the article. Another would have been Rare during their N64 years, though Nintendo eventually bought them out entirely during that era and they ceased to be second-party.
I think HAL (Kirby, Super Smash Bros, and Mother / Earthbound) also works as a good example of a second-party developer.
edited 7th Jan '11 12:44:28 PM by Poochy.EXE
Extra 1: Poochy Ain't StupidRebochan, this is from above wiki thing.
Isn't just like 1st Person, 2nd person, and 3rd Person in stories? 1st person is the characters point of view ("I walk through the door"), third person is like some random person out of the scene's view ("Sir Tropesalot walked through the door"), and 2nd person is like cookbooks. ("You then mix a half cup of flour into the somethingorother")
edited 7th Jan '11 2:15:56 PM by TheInferno
"The fact that your food can be made into makeshift bombs alarms the Hell out of me, Scrye." - CharlatanUser-generated content/levels is more like the traditional second-party definition, I guess. "You
" made the game.
But the gaming industry's always been a bit odd with nomenclature, with things like 2.5D. I can understand second-party coming as a term to straddle first- and second-party terms.

When it comes to discussion of gaming consoles, a phrase that comes up quite often is "third-party developer". Now, I understand that this refers to developers outside of the company that manufactures the console in question, as I understand that "first-party" usually means stuff put together in-house — games made by Nintendo for the Wii being the most obvious example.
What Just Bugs Me is the lack of a cognate for "second-party" developers. How, precisely, did that particular bit of terminology get skipped? Why don't we use that term to refer to what are now called third parties?
I imagine this could date back to when the NES/SNES and all the variations on the Megadrive/Genesis dominated the market, with the lazy-but-obvious parallel to politics, and the "third parties" being all the game developers other than Nintendo and Sega. Why, if this is the case, has the terminology then carried over into an era where it's clearly no longer accurate? Granted, I can think of one easy answer to the question (simple laziness), but it doesn't stop me from being irritated on this point.