That's because publishers tend to take on the risk. Development studios, as long as they can keep finding a new publisher to pay them, can churn out financial f

That's because publishers tend to take on the risk. Development studios, as long as they can keep finding a new publisher to pay them, can churn out financial failure after financial failure and it won't hurt them beyond possibly making it harder to find a new publisher to fund them. But if they can blame the game's failings on decisions made by the publishers -- and that's often the case, i.e. 'must be free to play!' or 'we don't need to market this game! if we make it, they will come!' or 'let's release it six months before the game is ready!' -- then the developer probably won't be hurt too much by a failed game, as long it wasn't super technically broken. I worked for a small publisher. We put out four games that did okay, and two games that lost a bunch of money (partially due to quality, partially due to misreading the market, partially due to timing, partially due to how the platforms worked), and those failures were enough to put us out of business seven years ago. Meanwhile the developers of those games are still chugging along today. By the way, I'm not saying those developers don't deserve to still be in business, as they did their job to the best of their abilities with the resources available. But that's just the nature of the business.