Yup.
This one happened to be an old bar study book from Barbri, but I imagine they got it from something like Black's Law Dictionary or a hornbook on contracts or sales laws.
That's not what second party means, legally speaking. If you have a quote from some place that shows different, I am willing to listen. It's referring to the parties to a contract - the first party being the seller, the second party being the buyer. A third party is an entity that is neither the buyer nor the seller but who is, typically, engaged by the seller in some way to supply part of the thing being sold. Even if the part is all the text, the other part is the brand intellectual property from the first party, for example. There can also be a third party beneficiary to a contract who are more closely aligned to the position of a buyer, but now we're really getting into esoteric stuff.
What first party, second party and third party mean in law/court documents is not the same as what they mean in other industries.
Here is a link that explains the difference in the video game industry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_developer
And here is one that shows the difference in the data sharing market:
http://www.knowonlineadvertising.com/what-is-first-party-second-party-and-third-party-data/
I am sure there are others as well.
Second-party developer is a colloquial term often used by gaming enthusiasts and media....
As with all encyclopedias, Wikipedia is a tertiary source and is rarely appropriate as a citation for academic, business, or journalistic research. The aim of such research is to uncover comprehensive and accurate information, which is located in primary sources and secondary sources.
What first party, second party and third party mean in law/court documents is not the same as what they mean in other industries.
Right there in your own "definition" from Wikipedia:
A colloquial term is equivalent to slang, it means language used in common discourse, non-formal. And the continuing sentence is then shown that it is by gamers and the media, meaning it's a coined term.
In this discussion, 2nd party most definitely means the consumer as it's talking about why 3rd parties are not having success marketing their goods in D&D. Who is the 3rd party marketing to? 2nd party as they are the ones directly purchasing from the creators of D&D (the 1st party).
For the record Wikipedia, while a great common resource, is not an acceptable form of citation in discourse as an actual definition. It's a community sourced and edited platform and is considered a tertiary source.
From Wikipeda itself:
You mean the contracts that all businesses use?
I've always assumed that "3rd party" here means 3rd party vis-a-vis the relationship between WotC and the D&D player. The italicised relationship isn't really a contractual one - most D&D players don't enter into contracts of purchase with WotC - but is some sort of more amorphous commercially significant relationship between publisher and reader/user.And in this context, it’s pretty clear that we are using the contractual form. They are publishers, not party to the original contracts or production of goods, with permission to supply compatible products to the purchasers of the original, core product, as long as they conform to the licensing agreements in place.
You mean the contracts that all businesses use?