Your Catalogue Licence Freezes on Signature Day. Check the New-Releases Clause Before You License HTML5 Games.

Most catalogue contracts fix the title list on signature day. Settle whether new releases are included before you license HTML5 games, not at renewal.

This clause almost never gets argued over, because it almost never looks like a clause. It is a definition. Usually the first one in the agreement, usually two lines long, usually the thing everyone scrolls past on the way to the fee schedule. Then eighteen months in, an operator asks their licensor for the titles that launched last quarter and discovers those were never part of the deal.

Nobody was being sharp. Both of the standard drafting patterns in HTML5 game licensing are normal and defensible, and each suits a different buyer. The failure is that buyers assume one and sign the other.

📅 "Schedule 1" Is a Photograph, Not a Feed

There are two ways a games licence defines what you bought, and a hybrid.

• Closed list. "The Titles listed in Schedule 1." Your catalogue is a fixed set. Anything released afterwards needs a contract amendment, a new order form, or a new fee.
• Open list. "The Licensor's HTML5 catalogue as it exists from time to time." Your catalogue tracks theirs. It grows when they add, and — this is the half buyers forget — it shrinks when they remove.
• Hybrid. A closed list plus an agreed mechanism for additions: a per-title rate, a batch rate, or an allowance of N additions per contract year at no extra fee.

You can work out which one you signed in about thirty seconds. If a spreadsheet of titles is attached as an appendix and the operative clause says "listed in", you have a closed list. If the definition points at a URL, a portal, or "the catalogue made available by the Licensor", you have an open one — and your next question is what governs removals, because an open list moves in both directions.

Neither pattern is better in the abstract. A twelve-month campaign licence for a single agency deployment wants a closed list: you QA the set once, you ship, you are done, and nothing changes under you mid-flight. A three-year portal or a carrier deal wants a feed, because a portal that never changes is a portal players stop opening. Buy the one that matches the term.

📈 The Supply You Are Snapshotting Is Moving Quickly

The reason this matters more now than it did five years ago is that the underlying release rate has changed. MCV/DEVELOP, citing research from the distribution platform Playgama, reported that HTML5 game releases in the first half of 2025 almost tripled year on year to 15,000 — 4.9 times the number launched in the first half of 2023.

Read that carefully before you use it as an argument for buying a feed. Fifteen thousand releases is not fifteen thousand titles worth licensing. A large share of that volume fails any serious portal's quality bar: broken on low-end Android, no mobile controls, no localisation, three minutes of content. Release volume tells you the supply side is expanding fast; it does not tell you the supply of things you would actually publish is expanding at the same rate.

It also means a closed list ages against a moving reference point. If you sign a 24-month deal on a fixed schedule in a category releasing at that rate, the gap between "your catalogue" and "the catalogue a buyer could sign today" widens every quarter of your term. That gap is fine if you priced for it. It is expensive if you assumed it away.

One caution on any single figure in this market: published audience numbers vary a lot depending on who measured and when. Poki was described at 30 million monthly active users in a Game Developer piece in April 2025 and at 100 million in the MCV article above. Both are credible outlets. Treat the range as the answer, and never build a business case on one number you cannot trace to a method.

📉 A "From Time to Time" Catalogue Can Shrink Too

Buyers negotiate the growth half of an open list and ignore the shrink half. Titles leave catalogues constantly, and usually for reasons your licensor did not choose:

• The licensor's own agreement with the developer expires. Most catalogues are themselves licensed in, non-exclusively, on fixed terms.
• A developer signs an exclusive somewhere else and their titles come out of general distribution.
• A rights complaint lands on a title — a font, a track, a character likeness — and it is pulled rather than defended.
• A browser change breaks it and it is withdrawn instead of fixed.
• A branded title reaches the end of a sublicence that was never as long as your term.

So the removal terms matter as much as the addition terms. Four things worth naming in writing: a notice period before a title is withdrawn, a run-off right that lets you keep serving anything already deployed until the end of your term, a floor on total title count so the catalogue cannot quietly halve, and a substitution obligation so a withdrawal is replaced rather than subtracted.

Notice periods deserve a reality check against your own release process. Thirty days is generous on a website you control. It is not thirty days if the title is inside an Android build sitting at a client, or in an app bundle that has to clear review, or on a carrier portal whose change window opens once a month. Ask for the notice period your slowest destination needs, not the one your fastest one does.

🏷️ Branded Titles Run on Somebody Else's Calendar

Branded and character titles are the clearest case of a catalogue entry that is not permanent. A branded game sits under two agreements: the one between you and the licensor, and the one between the licensor and the IP owner above it. The second is invisible to you and almost always shorter than a multi-year catalogue term.

Practical consequence: do not treat branded titles as catalogue furniture. Ask for the expiry date of each branded title individually, in writing, and diarise it. If you are planning a campaign, a seasonal event or a sponsor activation around a specific character, the question is not "is it in the catalogue" but "is it licensed through the date my campaign ends, plus the reporting period after it". Those are different questions and they get different answers.

🔢 Work Out How Many Titles You Actually Consume in a Month

Teams who buy HTML5 games for the first time almost always overestimate how quickly they can get them in front of players. Before you pay a premium for continuous additions, do the arithmetic on your own front end. The number that matters is not catalogue size, it is consumption rate: how many new titles your merchandising surface can actually absorb.

A worked example. Your homepage and category pages expose roughly 40 promoted slots. You rotate a quarter of them each month to keep the site looking alive. That is 10 new titles a month, 120 a year. Against a closed list of 300 licensed titles, you have two and a half years of rotation before you repeat yourself — which may comfortably outlast the term you are signing.

Now the honest half of the argument, because it changes what some readers should buy. For most portals the binding constraint is traffic, not titles. A stale top ten with real audience earns more than a freshly refreshed long tail with none. If your analytics show the top 20 titles carrying the overwhelming majority of plays and hundreds of licensed titles at near-zero, adding more supply is not the fix — acquisition, merchandising and retention are. Buy the feed when you have demonstrated you can turn new titles into new sessions. Until then, a closed list and a smaller cheque is the better trade.

🧮 Every Refresh Batch Has an Ingest Cost, and It Repeats

Continuous additions are only free in the contract. Each batch carries real work: thumbnails at the aspect ratios your layout needs, description copy rewritten so you are not publishing the same licensor-supplied paragraph as every other licensee, category mapping into your taxonomy rather than theirs, device QA on the low-end hardware your audience actually uses, localisation of titles and descriptions, and sitemap and index updates.

Price that as a standing monthly operations line, not a one-off launch cost. If nobody owns it, the additions you negotiated so hard for will sit in a staging folder — which is the most common way a refresh clause turns out to be worth nothing.

🤖 On the Android Side, Staleness Is Actively Punished

If your deal includes APK builds, the refresh clause is also a maintenance clause, and the store enforces it for you. TechCrunch, reporting Appfigures data in April 2025, found Google Play had gone from about 3.4 million apps at the start of 2024 to roughly 1.8 million — a 47% decline — while Apple's App Store stayed effectively flat, moving from 1.6 million to about 1.64 million. Google pointed to its July 2024 policy raising minimum quality requirements and banning apps with limited functionality and content, plus expanded developer verification and testing requirements.

The same Appfigures analysis noted new releases were actually up 7.1% year on year. So this is a removal story, not a supply story. That is the point for anyone licensing an Android catalogue: the risk is not that new titles stop existing, it is that unmaintained ones stop being distributable. When you buy Android games under an APK game licensing deal, the clause you need is not only "do I get new titles" but "who rebuilds the existing ones when the target API level moves, and at whose cost". Get both answers before signature, and get them named as obligations rather than intentions.

🚫 Five Ways Buyers Get the Refresh Clause Wrong

1. Confusing the marketing page with the contract. The catalogue count on a licensor's website is not the defined term in your agreement. Only Schedule 1 is.
2. Paying for a feed with no capacity to ingest it. Additions you never publish are a cost line with no revenue line attached.
3. No removal notice. The first time you learn a title is gone should not be a 404 on a client's site.
4. Treating branded titles as permanent inventory. They expire on the IP owner's calendar, not yours, and rarely on the same date as your catalogue term.
5. Leaving the addition price to renewal. That is the moment you have least leverage. Fix the per-title or per-batch rate at signature, when the licensor is still competing for the deal.

📋 Nine Questions to Ask Before You License HTML5 Games on a Multi-Year Term

1. Is the Catalogue a fixed schedule or the catalogue "as it exists from time to time"? Show me the defining clause.
2. How many titles did you add to the catalogue in each of the last four quarters?
3. How many did you remove, and why?
4. What notice do I get before a title is withdrawn, and does that notice period account for app-store review?
5. If a title is withdrawn, can I keep serving copies already deployed until my term ends?
6. Is there a minimum title count I can rely on for the term?
7. What is the price of adding titles mid-term, per title and per batch, fixed now?
8. For each branded title I care about, what is its own expiry date?
9. For APK builds: who rebuilds and resubmits when platform requirements change, and is that included?

A licensor who answers all nine without going quiet is a licensor you can plan a two-year roadmap against. One who cannot produce quarterly add and remove counts is telling you something useful about how actively the catalogue is maintained.

🎯 What You Get When You License HTML5 Games From a Direct Licensor

Forestry Games has been licensing games since 2017 and licenses a catalogue of 1,049 titles covering both HTML5 and Android APK builds, with titles also published on Google Play and the Apple App Store. Because it develops HTML5 games in-house as well as licensing them, the catalogue and the roadmap sit with the same organisation you are contracting with — which is what makes an addition question answerable in the first place.

A licence conversation covers scope in the terms this article argues for: which titles, on which platforms, for which territories and term, with HTML5 builds and APK builds handled in one negotiation rather than two. Delivery can be a hosted embed, files on your own infrastructure, or a white-label game portal built on the catalogue, and the same conversation covers distribution and monetization support rather than ending at a file handover. If you want to see the shape of the inventory before you talk scope, browse the catalogue, or look at the HTML5 games and Android games sections directly.

🧸 Licensing Branded Games for Campaigns, Portals and Events

Forestry Games works with branded IP and has brand partnerships including Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. Businesses can license branded games through Forestry Games for marketing campaigns, game portals, events and apps, alongside the generic catalogue.

If a branded title is part of your plan, raise it at the scope stage rather than after the catalogue is signed, because the term and approval path attached to branded content differ from those of a standard title. The next action is a short one: ask for a licence scope that names your titles, your platforms, your term and your refresh terms, or request a portal demo if you want to see how a catalogue behaves inside a running site before you commit to one.

✅ The Thirty-Second Test to Run on Your Current Contract

Open the agreement you are already operating under and search it for four strings: "from time to time", "Schedule", "withdraw" and "remove". Those four searches will tell you whether your catalogue is a snapshot or a feed, whether it can shrink, and how much warning you get if it does. Most operators are surprised by at least one of the answers.

Then do it again on the draft in front of you before you sign it. The refresh terms cost nothing to negotiate at signature and are close to impossible to fix at month fourteen, which is exactly when you will want them.