It can be confusing who is actually making a game and who is responsible for the quality. If a game sucks, we want to know who to blame, and if it’s great, we want to make sure we praise the right person. If we look at a game like Mass Effect: Andromeda, the public has a right to know who screwed the pooch, but we don’t know if it’s the developer – Bioware – or if it’s the publisher – EA.

Many people immediately blamed EA because – well, most people hate them, but after realizing the game was in development for five years (it was hardly rushed) and that Bioware Montreal – not Bioware’s main developers in Edmonton – decided to handle the project, details begin to emerge about who was actually at fault, and it became more obvious it was the bungling of a development team that couldn’t handle an enormous project.

So how do we tell the difference between these two?

In the simplest terms, the publisher is the boss. Sometimes they finance what a developer cannot. Borderlands was the vision of Randy Pitchford of Gearbox. He originated the concept, development, and execution of the game. 2K Games merely supplied the distribution and a possible portion of the advertising and creation costs. It’s like writing a novel. Gearbox wrote it, then they approached a publisher to distribute it (2K Games).

But that doesn’t also mean that there are not publishers pulling the puppet strings of entire studios. When a developer is in-house, meaning the publisher owns them, the process becomes much dirtier. Though Andromeda was a developers screw up, there is a lot of debate about who was behind the ending to Mass Effect 3.

One theory behind Mass Effect 3’s unsatisfying ending was that EA wanted to make more off the DLC containing the ‘real’ ending. This might seem crazy except that seven years ago, the CEO of publisher Codemasters, Rod Cousens, essentially said that is exactly what publishers should do.