Three Licensors Don't Give You Three Catalogues. Count Unique Titles Before You License HTML5 Games.

Count unique titles, not headline ones, before you license HTML5 games from a second supplier — non-exclusive deals mean catalogues overlap by design.

The case for running more than one games licensor is intuitive and almost never examined. Two suppliers means twice the catalogue, competitive tension on price, and a fallback if one of them goes quiet. Procurement likes it. It reads like risk management.

Then the title lists arrive, somebody opens both in a spreadsheet, and the second supplier's eight hundred games turn out to contain a large slice of the first supplier's nine hundred. Nobody asked the one question that decides whether a second supplier is worth signing: how many games does it add that you do not already have?

🔁 Non-Exclusive Licensing Is the Default, and That Is the Whole Story

Casual web game developers overwhelmingly sell non-exclusive licences. Jose Maria Martinez's list of HTML5 game publishers, published on Game Developer in 2015, put it plainly: the most-used model is the non-exclusive licence, meaning a developer "may sell user licenses of your HTML5 games to as many publishers or distributors as you can," and exclusive deals are far less common. That article is over a decade old, which is exactly why it is worth citing — the structure it described has not moved.

Current advice says the same thing. A June 2026 guide to selling a browser game to a publisher tells developers that non-exclusive deals "let you stack revenue across multiple portals, which usually nets more total income," and recommends spreading a single game across three of them. It is a trade guide rather than research — but the strategic advice is unambiguous, and a great many developers follow it.

Martinez also drew a distinction most buyers never internalise: distributors aggregate games to supply publishers and white-label portals, while publishers run destination sites of their own. A title can therefore reach you through two different aggregators without either doing anything unusual. Overlap is not a supplier failing. It is the shape of the market.

🔢 "1,800 Titles" Is an Addition Sum, Not an Inventory

The number on a proposal is a catalogue size. The number that matters to you is the marginal unique addition — how many playable games land on your portal that were not already going to be there. Those two numbers are not close, and the gap is invisible until you measure it.

I am not going to give you an overlap percentage, because none exists. No one publishes a measured figure for how much two arbitrary HTML5 catalogues intersect, and any supplier who quotes you one is estimating. That absence is the argument for running the test yourself rather than a reason to skip it.

What you can reason about is where the overlap concentrates. Duplication follows licensing volume, so it clusters in the genres that get licensed most: match-3, solitaire and mahjong, arcade one-tappers, .io-style multiplayer, bubble shooters, dress-up and cooking. Those are also the categories most portals are relying on to carry traffic. The long tail — a physics puzzler from a two-person studio, a niche sports title, something with unusual controls — is where suppliers genuinely differ, and it is the part of the catalogue that gets the fewest plays.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that a second supplier tends to duplicate your best-performing shelf and differentiate on your worst one. Not always — but often enough that you should assume it until your own manifest comparison says otherwise.

🧪 The Overlap Test, Run in an Afternoon

This is a spreadsheet job, not a project. Do it during evaluation, before any contract is drafted.

1. Ask every shortlisted supplier for a full title manifest as CSV — title, developer or studio, genre, orientation, supported languages, and available formats. A supplier that will not show you the list before signature has told you something useful for free.
2. Normalise the titles. Lowercase everything, strip punctuation and strip the noise words that get bolted on per-portal: "HTML5", "Online", "Free", "Deluxe", trailing version numbers.
3. Match on developer name first, title second. Same studio plus a similar title is a probable duplicate. Title-only matching produces false positives — a hundred unrelated games are called Bubble Shooter.
4. Eyeball a hundred rows by hand. Automated matching misses reskins: the same build with new art and a new name is a duplicate experience for your player even when it is a legitimately separate licence.
5. Produce three numbers, not one: total unique titles across all suppliers, unique titles added by supplier B over supplier A, and unique additions inside your three highest-traffic genres.
6. Divide supplier B's annual fee by that third number. That is your real cost per useful title, and it is the figure to take into the negotiation.

One wrinkle worth catching early. Two suppliers can carry different builds of the same underlying game under different terms. That is worse than a plain duplicate: a player can meet the same game twice on your portal under two names, your play reporting treats them as two titles, and your two contracts may impose different territory, branding or reporting obligations on what a user experiences as one product.

➕ What Each Extra Supplier Costs You Off the Price Sheet

The licence fee is the cheap part. Every additional supplier duplicates a fixed stack of work that nobody line-items:

• A second contract to review, negotiate and re-read at renewal — with its own notice date, which is the date that actually binds you.
• A second security and vendor-onboarding pass through your own procurement.
• A second technical handover format: different folder structures, different embed method, different hosting arrangement, possibly a different portal SDK.
• A second metadata standard — thumbnails at different aspect ratios, descriptions at different lengths, categories that do not map to yours.
• A second reporting format, on a month boundary that probably is not the same as the first supplier's, feeding an invoice you have to reconcile separately.
• A second escalation path for the day a title breaks in a browser update, and a second takedown workflow for the day an IP complaint lands.

That load falls on a team smaller than you think. Venminder's State of Third-Party Risk Management 2025 survey found most organisations have just one or two employees dedicated to third-party risk management, and that 49% experienced some kind of third-party cyber incident in the preceding twelve months. That is cross-industry risk data, not games data, and I would not stretch it further than this: the people who absorb each new supplier relationship are already thin on the ground.

The broader procurement instinct runs the same way. ADAPT's 2024 CIO Edge research, covering more than 140 CIOs across Australia and New Zealand, found 68% planning to consolidate vendor engagements, with those pursuing it targeting roughly a 20% cut in supplier count. That is enterprise IT in one region, not game licensing — but the people who manage supplier portfolios for a living are moving toward fewer, deeper relationships, and it is worth asking why your games shelf should be the exception.

📐 Add a Supplier for Coverage You Cannot Otherwise Get

There is a clean test for a second licensor: it must grant you something the first one cannot, not more of what the first one already gives you. Reasons that survive scrutiny:

• A genre gap your own data proves. Not a gap you assume — a gap visible in search queries, session data or a pilot.
• Branded or licensed IP that only one party can clear. Character rights are held, not aggregated.
• Territory or language rights your primary supplier cannot grant. A licence that stops at a border is a real reason to add a second one.
• A format your primary does not carry. If you need both HTML5 builds and Android APKs and your primary only does one, that is a genuine gap — though it disappears entirely if your primary carries both, which is the point of asking early.
• Continuity, but only if it is real. A second supplier is redundancy only when its titles are hosted independently of the first. Two catalogues served from the same infrastructure are one point of failure wearing two invoices.

Reasons that do not survive scrutiny: a bigger number in the board deck, price leverage that costs more in coordination than it wins in discount, and dual-sourcing as a reflex imported from a category where the units are interchangeable. Games are not interchangeable units. A duplicate title is not a second source of anything.

🚫 When One Games Licensor Is the Wrong Answer

Consolidation is not always right, and pretending otherwise would make everything above less useful. Four cases where a catalogue licence is not the tool:

• You need one bespoke game. A single branded title for a campaign or a booth is a commission, not a catalogue purchase. Brief a studio — or a licensor's bespoke tier — and pay for a build, not for access.
• You need a specific franchise. If the requirement is one named character or property, go to the rights holder or its licensing agent. No catalogue depth substitutes for a right somebody else controls.
• You have a product team and a thesis. If you can staff development and you have a defensible view about a genre, building is often correct and is usually discovered to be correct too late.
• A regulated market demands a local contracting entity. Sometimes the counterparty is dictated by law, not by preference.

🧾 Four Buyer Scenarios, Decided

A carrier portal: 200 titles live in six weeks, three languages

One full-service licensor. The binding constraint here is not title count, it is delivery: builds, localised metadata, thumbnails at the operator's ratios, and one accountable party when something fails in week five. Adding a second supplier to this timeline adds an integration, not a catalogue.

An agency: one branded game for a trade-show booth

Neither a catalogue nor multiple suppliers. This is a single commissioned build with a licensed character on top, and the long pole is brand approval rather than production. Buying catalogue access for this is buying the wrong product.

An OEM Android preload: APK builds, signing, device fleet

One supplier that carries HTML5 and Android under the same conversation. Splitting formats across two licensors means two contracts, two update cadences and two answers every time a platform policy changes — for what a device maker experiences as one shelf.

A publisher: a games tab plus one puzzle franchise it cannot get generically

Two suppliers, and this is the case where two is correct. One catalogue licence for volume and refresh, one specific deal for the named property. The second supplier is there for a right, not for a number — which is the whole test.

📋 Nine Questions Before You Add a Second Games Licensor

1. What is the unique-title count after de-duplicating both manifests, and who produced that number?
2. How many unique additions fall inside our top three genres by session share?
3. What does this supplier grant that our current one cannot — a right, a format, a territory, a property?
4. Are its titles hosted independently, so this counts as continuity rather than a second invoice?
5. Which reporting fields differ, and who reconciles two formats into one revenue number each month?
6. Do the two contracts impose conflicting territory, branding or takedown obligations on overlapping titles?
7. What is the notice date on each agreement, and are they in the same calendar?
8. What does the second integration cost in engineering days, and who is doing them?
9. If we asked our existing licensor to close the gap instead, what would it say?

That last one gets skipped constantly. A great many second-supplier decisions are really unasked questions to the first supplier.

🚫 Five Ways a Multi-Supplier Catalogue Goes Wrong

• Counting titles instead of unique titles in the business case, then explaining the shortfall after launch.
• Shipping visible duplicates. Two entries for the same game on one portal reads as carelessness to a player and pollutes every per-title metric you have.
• Letting renewal calendars drift apart until you are permanently three months from someone's notice date and never negotiating from a clean position.
• Reconciling two report formats by hand for a year, then discovering the two suppliers count a "play" differently and your published numbers were never comparable.
• Assuming redundancy you do not have — two suppliers, one hosting dependency, one outage that takes the whole shelf down.

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

Licensing direct rather than through a chain of intermediaries means the party granting the rights is the party that answers the phone. Forestry Games has operated since 2017 and licenses a catalogue of 1,049 titles spanning HTML5 and Android APK games, with titles also published on Google Play and the Apple App Store, and it develops HTML5 games in-house.

For a buyer, a licence conversation covers scope — territory, term, platforms, number of properties — and delivery: HTML5 builds, APK builds, source where the deal supports it, branding applied to the build, and hosting either on our side or on yours. Because both formats sit inside one catalogue, the HTML5-versus-APK question is a scoping decision rather than a second procurement cycle. You can browse the catalogue before you talk to anyone, look at what is available when you license HTML5 games for a portal or campaign, and check the Android game catalogue if a preload or an app store listing is in scope. Ask for the full title manifest early — you should be running the overlap test on us too.

🧸 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 game content through Forestry Games for marketing campaigns, white-label portals, live events and mobile apps.

Branded titles are the clearest example of the coverage principle in this post: a character licence is a right somebody holds, not a volume you shop around for, and it is the one part of a games shelf where "who can actually clear this" beats every other criterion. If a branded game is in your plan, name the use case, the territory and the audience age at the first conversation — those three answers determine what is possible. A practical next step is to ask for a licence scope against your use case, or request a white-label portal demo to see how a catalogue and branded titles sit together in one shelf.

✅ Ask for the Manifest Before You Ask for the Price

The order of the questions is the whole discipline here. Price per title is meaningless until you know how many of those titles you would be buying twice, and you cannot know that from a proposal — only from two lists side by side.

So do this before your next supplier call: request full title manifests from everyone on your shortlist, de-duplicate on developer and normalised title, and compute unique additions inside your top three genres. If a second supplier still adds real coverage, sign it and put both notice dates in one calendar. If it does not, you have saved yourself a contract, an integration, a reporting format and a renewal — and the budget can go to the part of this that actually moves plays, which was never the number of games on the shelf.