[quote name='ObiWanShinobi']Again, I don't distinguish between what Sony owns and what Sony publishes. Naughty Dog, for instance, operates in almost exactly the same way as independents Insomniac and Sucker Punch. They operate on the same technology, have the same development techniques, share information freely between each other, and have comparable games. Yet, only Naughty Dog is owned by Sony. Does this mean that Sony made Naughty Dog's games while they only published Sucker Punch's and Insomniac's games?[/QUOTE]
Sucker Punch and Naughty Dog are - at best or worst, depending on how you want to look at it - second parties to Sony (according to what I see on Wikipedia, which could very well be wrong). NST/Retro Studios/Monolith are the same re: Nintendo, just as Rare/Bungie are re: Microsoft. You could make the argument that they are developed by whoever owns them, but that's getting really technical on a gray area within the industry.
Insomniac - to my knowledge and what I could research - suggests that it is a second party to Sony in the most suggestive of ways, in that their games appear only on Sony systems, but they are still independent.
If you want to be brutally honest, Sony makes none of their games, just like Microsoft doesn't make Halo and Nintendo doesn't make Metroid Prime. The differences are subtle, however. Bungie - from what I understand - could always make a game for another system. Rare does exactly this on occasion with their own properties on the DS (Diddy Kong Racing). Metroid is a franchise IP owned by Nintendo, and they have some of their own people working on it at Retro.
The bigger point to be made is that there are games published by a company that they have nothing to do with, games that are published that they had a hand in, and games that are published that they fully developed. Since I know Nintendo properties the best, I can think of one for each: Forever Blue (Wii, from Arika), Metroid Prime (Gamecube/Wii, from Retro as a second party), and Zelda (fully developed internally).
That doesn't necessarily mean that Nintendo "made" all three. I don't think anyone who knows a thing or two about this industry thinks Microsoft makes Halo, because they probably know Bungie does. MS probably gives tons of financial backing and has some little say in the product, but I'm willing to bet they don't want to f*ck up their most valuable property, so they leave Bungie to their own devices.
There's a huge gap between a publisher and a developer, and then there are small places for argument when you throw in second parties and things like sharing game engines. Epic games isn't making Too Human, but Silicon Knights is using the Unreal Tournament 3 engine. However, at no time does Epic actually develop the game - they just handed someone some tools to make it.
Holding up a list of games and saying X made them requires some research and some clear distinctions on who actually developed it. If it's farmed out versus financially backed versus a joint endeavor versus internal. All of that has to come into consideration at some point, and it's going to make the list far harder to complete and maintain if you're really and truly trying to take it to the clear boundaries and criteria.
You can't make it as simple as publisher = developer, because that's a loaded equation that doesn't work out.
