Third party game development is an unstable industry

Third party game development is an unstable industry, the survival of small developers may be entirely dependent on a publisher's funds. The cancellation of a game is fatal for a small developer. Because of this, many smaller development companies can only exist for years or even only a few months Rocket League Items. Every game developer's management is constantly distracted by the constant fight for milestone and waiting for the next game contract.

Extremely successful video game developers have a generally satisfied with the "withdrawal strategy", the company sold to publishers, thus becoming an internal developer.

Compared to third-party development teams, the internal development team often has greater freedom in the design and content of the game. Part of the reason is that it is possible for the interests to become fully consistent with the publisher after the developer becomes an employee of the publisher. Publishers can therefore save some effort, do not have to investigate whether the developer took the publisher's money to raise their own.

In recent years, the larger publishers have acquired several third-party developers. Although these development teams are now technically "internal", they tend to continue to run in an autonomous way, with each team having its own culture and working methods. For example: Raven (1997), Neversoft (1999), Z-Axis (2001), Treyarch (2001), Luxoflux (2002), Shaba (2002), Infinity Ward (2003) and Vicarious Visions (2005) ). All of these developers continue to operate as they were before the acquisition, with the main differences being exclusive and financial details.

History has shown that publishers tend to be more tolerant of their development teams beyond budget and bounce than third-party developers.

The internal development team of the game hardware manufacturer is also known as the first party developer. A company that is closely tied to a game maker (also a publisher) is called a second-party developer. It is puzzling that publishers sometimes describe themselves as a third party developer when they describe their relationship with game makers (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo). This special distinction between the first party, the second party and the third party developer generally does not apply to PC game developers.