Build, Commission or License HTML5 Games: The Answer Is Titles Per Month, Not Cost Per Title

Whether to build, commission or license HTML5 games is a supply-shape decision, not a price decision: it turns on how many titles you need live, and by when.

The comparison almost always gets run on the wrong axis. Someone opens a spreadsheet with three columns — hire a team, pay a studio, license a catalogue — and fills each column with a cost per game. Then they pick the smallest number. The arithmetic is fine. The decision is useless, because the three routes do not produce the same thing.

One produces a title every few months, indefinitely. One produces exactly one title, once. One produces several hundred titles on the day the contract is signed. Compare them on cost per title and you will regularly pick a route that physically cannot deliver what your launch date requires — and you will not find that out until month three.

🧮 Three Routes, Three Different Shapes of Supply

Stop thinking in totals and start thinking in rates. Each route has a natural output shape, and the shape is not negotiable.

• In-house build: serial and permanent. Output is roughly team size divided by production cycle. Cost is a standing monthly charge that begins before the first title exists and does not stop when it ships.
• Commissioned build: fixed and finite. One spec, one delivery date, one game. The second game costs about what the first one did.
• Catalogue licence: parallel and immediate. The games already exist. You are not buying production capacity, you are buying the right to distribute finished work, so delivery is governed by your integration schedule rather than anyone's build schedule.

Written as rates: in-house gives you titles per quarter, a commission gives you titles per project, and a licence gives you titles per signature. Match the rate to your requirement first. The money conversation is much easier once only one or two routes are still standing.

💼 What an In-House Team Costs Before It Ships Anything

Start with the seat, not the salary. SHRM's recruiting benchmarking, drawn from over 4,600 organisations, puts the median time-to-fill for non-executive positions at 39 calendar days in 2026 — down from the prior year, and that is the median across all non-executive roles. Specialist engineering hires typically sit above a general median, not below it. You can see the summary on SHRM's benchmarking page.

Then the salary. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median annual wage for software developers of $133,080 as of May 2024, with employment in the category projected to grow 15% from 2024 to 2034 — much faster than average, which is a polite way of saying you are bidding against everyone else (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook). That is base wage, one person, before employer taxes, benefits, hardware, tooling and the management time to run them. A game is not one discipline either — art, design, audio and QA are separate heads or separate contracts.

Put the calendar together honestly: roughly six weeks to fill the first seat, onboarding after that, then a first production cycle. Your first playable is a quarter or two out in the good case, and it is one title.

The genuine case for building in-house is the one nobody makes loudly enough: it is the only route where the marginal title gets cheaper. Title 20 from your own team costs the same payroll that produced title 1. You own the code, you set the roadmap, and no third party's term, territory or platform clause constrains what you do with it. If your product needs a continuous stream of original titles for years, that is the cheapest supply at scale and the only one that leaves you owning the asset outright. Nothing in this post argues otherwise.

🏗️ What a Commissioned Studio Build Buys — and What It Can't

A commission buys precision. One game, exactly to spec, shaped around a brand, a mechanic or a client's characters, with exclusivity if you negotiate for it. When the game itself is the deliverable — a booth game, a campaign mechanic, an activation built around IP you control — this is the correct route and a catalogue licence is not a substitute for it.

One 2026 factor cuts in this route's favour, and buyers should know it. The GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry report, surveying more than 2,300 game industry professionals, found that 28% had been laid off in the past two years, rising to 33% in the United States. Half said their current or most recent employer conducted layoffs in the past 12 months — two-thirds of respondents at AAA studios, one-third at indie studios. Read as a buyer rather than as an employee, that means experienced contract and studio capacity is more available now than it was three years ago. If you have one high-value game to make, this is not a bad market to be commissioning in.

What a commission cannot do is scale. Two games cost roughly twice. Twenty cost roughly twenty times. No negotiating position changes that, because a studio prices per project and a project is what it makes. Commissioning is the most expensive possible way to fill a catalogue, and it is a mistake people make in increments rather than all at once.

📦 Why Operators License HTML5 Games: Supply That Arrives All at Once

The defining property of a catalogue licence is that the games are already finished. That single fact produces everything else about the route.

Your delivery date stops depending on production and starts depending on integration: embedding, categorisation, analytics, payment and consent plumbing, localising your shell. Those are your engineers' tasks, on your schedule, and they are the same amount of work for 40 titles or 400. The marginal title inside a licensed catalogue is close to free, which turns "300 games or 30?" from a production question into a scope question you settle in one call.

The trade is ownership. You did not write these games and you cannot rewrite them. Modification rights, term, territory, platform and format are all clauses, and they mean exactly what they say. If you need to change a build, the agreement has to grant it — source-code deals exist and are a different, more expensive conversation than a straight distribution licence. Anyone who tells you a catalogue licence gives you the flexibility of your own codebase is selling you something. The constraint is the price of the speed, and for most operators it is a fair trade.

🧾 Four Buyer Scenarios, Run Honestly

200 titles live on a carrier portal in six weeks

Licence, and it is not close. In-house cannot produce 200 titles in six weeks at any headcount, and the median 39 days to fill a single seat means you would still be interviewing at go-live. Commissioning 200 titles is 200 projects. This scenario is the one a catalogue licence exists to answer, and it is why telecom and portal buyers rarely evaluate the other two routes seriously.

One branded game for a trade-show booth in eight weeks

Commission — or a licensed base title reskinned, if a suitable one exists and the licence permits modification. What does not work is a straight catalogue licence: nobody's stock puzzle game is your client's activation, and pretending otherwise produces a booth nobody stops at. If the brief is one game carrying a brand, pay for one game carrying a brand. Our own notes on briefing games built for trade shows and booths assume exactly that.

Two original titles a month, indefinitely, fully owned

Build in-house. A licence is the wrong instrument for a permanent original-content requirement, and commissioning title by title is the most expensive version of the same thing. If original output is your product rather than an input to it, hire. The payroll line is the point, not the problem.

An Android catalogue for an OEM preload or a carrier app store

Licence, with format written into the deal. The thing to check is whether the same agreement covers web and native output, because "we have HTML5 versions" and "we can hand you signed, current APK builds" are different capabilities. If you expect to buy Android games as well as web builds, raise APK game licensing in the first call rather than after signature.

🔀 Most Operators Need Two of the Three

The routes are not mutually exclusive, and treating the decision as exclusive is where budgets get wasted. The shape that works for most game businesses splits by role:

• License the floor. Catalogue breadth on day one, so the product has something to be from launch.
• Commission the hero. The one or two titles that carry the brand, the campaign or the differentiation.
• Hire for the surface. Portal, accounts, billing, analytics, retention, experimentation.

That last line is the one people get wrong most often. The engineering that decides whether a games business works is mostly not game engineering — it is the shell around the games. Hiring three gameplay programmers and outsourcing your analytics is precisely backwards, and it is a common way to spend a year producing a handful of titles nobody can find.

🚫 Four Ways This Decision Gets Made Badly

• Hiring a team to fill a catalogue. Serial production against a parallel requirement. Two years later you have a dozen titles and a permanent payroll line, and the catalogue gap is unchanged.
• Commissioning bespoke games as launch inventory. You paid title prices for shelf-filling. Cost per title never falls, because it structurally cannot.
• Licensing with no traffic plan. A catalogue is inventory, not demand. Licensing solves supply and nothing else; a portal with 1,000 titles and no acquisition plan earns roughly what a portal with 40 does.
• Assuming rights you were not granted. In-house gives you modification rights automatically. A commission gives them to you only if the contract assigns the IP — work-for-hire is not universal and not automatic. A licence gives them only where it says so, in writing.

✅ The Six Questions That Settle It

1. How many distinct titles do you need live on day one? Under five points to commissioning or building. Over fifty points to licensing, without much argument.
2. What is the ongoing rate after launch? Zero to a trickle favours a licence. Two or more original titles a month, forever, favours a team.
3. Does any single title have to be uniquely yours? If yes, that title is a commission or a build regardless of how the other 200 arrive.
4. Do you need web and native builds of the same games? Ask before signature. Multi-format is a supply question, not a technical afterthought.
5. Who is contractually obliged when a browser release breaks a build? Your own team, a licensor who maintains the catalogue, or nobody. All three are real answers and only one of them is free.
6. What does year two cost? A commission's cost repeats per title. A hire's cost repeats monthly. A licence renewal is a negotiation — model it now, while you still have alternatives.

🎮 How HTML5 Game Licensing Actually Works From a Direct Licensor

Forestry Games has operated since 2017 and licenses a catalogue of 1,049 titles covering HTML5 and Android APK games, with titles also published on Google Play and the Apple App Store. A licence from a direct licensor rather than a reseller means the scope conversation is a real one: which titles, which territories, which platforms, which formats, and for how long.

Practically, what a licensee receives is HTML5 builds for web embedding, APK builds where Android distribution is in scope, source where the specific deal covers it, branding and white-label options, and hosting either on your infrastructure or ours. The catalogue is sliced to the requirement rather than handed over whole — a full-breadth portal, a single-vertical selection, or a category slice for one campaign. If your day-one number from the six questions above is large, that is the conversation to start: browse the catalogue or look at how buyers license HTML5 games for portals, apps and campaigns.

🏷️ Licensing Branded Games for Campaigns, Portals and Events

Some briefs need recognisable characters rather than generic ones, and that changes the licensing route. Forestry Games develops HTML5 games in-house, works with branded IP, and has brand partnerships including Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. Businesses can license branded game content through Forestry Games for marketing campaigns, portals, events and apps.

Expect a branded licence to be tighter than a generic one: narrower scope, defined territories and terms, and an approval process that sits on the critical path of your schedule rather than beside it. Plan around that from the start rather than discovering it in week six. The next step depends on which of the three routes the six questions pointed you to — ask for a licence scope on a specific title list, request a white-label game portal demo, or bring the brief for a commissioned build.

🧭 Decide the Rate Before You Compare the Price

Run your own requirement through one line before you run it through a spreadsheet: how many distinct titles do you need live, and at what ongoing rate? A launch requirement measured in hundreds is a licensing question and always was. A single high-value game is a commissioning question. A permanent original-content pipeline is a hiring question, and paying a licensor or a studio to imitate one is how that budget gets wasted.

Most operators land on two of the three, and the split is usually the same: license the breadth, commission the differentiator, hire for everything that is not a game. If your day-one number is the part that does not fit, put a title list together and ask for a licence scope against it — that is a week of work, not a quarter, and it tells you what the other two routes are actually competing with.