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S.T.A.G.E. on 25 July 2015
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sasquatchmontana said:
S.T.A.G.E. said:

Sunset Overdrive is second party and Microsoft published it. Publishing does not denote ownership.

No one said Microsoft owned the SSO franchise. Insomniac Games is a 3rd party studio and own the IP, they are however not a publisher in any way, shape or form. Microsoft is. And when they publish a game on a console they manufacture, it's a first party game.

From the man who watches

"Releasing new IP and making it stand out is always a challenge, especially when you got Call of Duty coming with a massive game, you've got Assassin's Creed coming with another great game, you've got Halo there, and here we are with Sunset and in the end the number of bundles and custom consoles you do is not a huge percentage of the game sales, but I wanted to put a stake out there, our first time working with Ted [Price] and the team Insomniac, that this is really a first party game for us and we're really behind it."

No. A First party denotes ownership of said intellectual property overall. Microsoft owns the IP to Quantum Break and Scalebound, but they are both made by third party, hence why its definitively called first party. The deal to make the games gave them the rights from the start to the IP as their own property. The struggle over intellectual property with Sony is why they went to Microsoft. They dont want anyone owning their game, its theirs. They just need to find a publisher and Microsoft needed games so they published it.

Let me create an example for you. Marvel/Disney owns the rights to the Marvel family of games, but Activision develops and publishes the games via a license. Through the license, Disney and Marvel collect fees even though they dont publish because they own the Licensce and through ownership collect royalties and other things from the game because of the value of their product when other vendors feel the need to create a business proposition to create games from said companies IP license. Recently Marvel stripped Activision of their rights to their games license and all Activision made games were stripped from PSN and Xbox Live.

This is what it means to truly be first party, to have sole ownership of said intellectual property.