Published games vs Developed games

I have a pretty solid idea what it means that Chucklefish developed a game, i.e., Starbound, but i'm a little fuzzy what it means when chucklefish publishes games, i.e., Stardew Valley and Risk of Rain. Does Chucklefish have some amount of input into the creation of those games? If so, how much? What does the other game gain by having it published by Chucklefish instead of their own group? And what does that make Chucklefish responsible for in that regard?

 

Well, far as I know, there are publishers such as Chucklefish, who might/might not help in the development of the game in question (e g- SV), but one of the responsibilities of publishers is the marketing and market research of said product, in case of bigger publishers (aka your typical AAA publisher) they are also responsible for the manufacturing of the product, the phisical material so to speak; Discs, cartridges, cases, special editions, covers and any sort of visual and phisical media is to be taken by the publisher, while the developer is only responsible for the game as such. The Software and its dependencies might be entirely managed by the developer, or if the publisher has contracted a developer to create a game of their own, its called External Development.

Larger publishers may also help with localization. Lets say... Undertale, its an indie game published by its own creator, the game is only officially available in english, the jokes and humour are based on an english audience, if it were to be published by Nintendo, they would have to translate the game, code it to be playable in one of their consoles, and change any specific dialogue to target wider audiences (without making changes to key dialogue, althought its been known to happen regardless). The target audience could be japanese, and so the jokes and language used would have to be changed to be understandable to a japanese audience.