An exclusive game is usually commissioned as a commercial idea and delivered into a supply chain. A platform, aggregator or studio network decides that one market is missing a title, pays for it, and then discovers that the thing it now owns has to be manufactured, supplied, hosted and published by parties whose licence positions were never written down. That is the gap this article is about. It is not the operator’s brief — that document is covered in the branded commissioning brief — it is the set of decisions that belongs to the party in the middle of the chain, the one that buys the title and passes it on.
The reason these decisions are the platform’s and not the studio’s is simple. A studio can build a game and a laboratory can test it. Neither can decide who is legally entitled to put that software in front of players in a particular market, which company is accountable for the game’s behaviour, or what the platform is allowed to do with the title once it exists. Those are the platform’s to settle, and they are cheapest to settle before anyone starts building.
A platform is a supplier before it is a catalogue
The word “catalogue” makes a platform sound like a shop. In the regulated supply chain it is closer to a manufacturer and a distributor, and the rules are written for those roles.
In Great Britain, licence condition 2.2.1 is blunt about who may touch gambling software. It applies to all remote casino, bingo and betting licences other than ancillary licences and remote betting intermediary (trading room only) licences, and it says: “All gambling software used by the licensee must have been manufactured by the holder of a gambling software operating licence. All such gambling software must also be supplied to the licensee by a holder of a gambling software operating licence. Such software must only be installed or adapted by the holder of such a licence.”
That sentence distributes obligations across every party in the chain, not just the one that writes code. The Gambling Commission’s own guidance on what counts as gambling software makes the distribution explicit and, for a platform, uncomfortable: the Commission does not expect a licence from a business whose only involvement is buying software and selling it on “without any involvement itself in its manufacture, adaptation or installation” — but then closes that door. “The exception is that the final supplier to a Commission licensed operator will require a gambling software licence as set out in Licence condition 2.2.1, even if they actually perform no development/manufacturing, adaptation or installation activity.”
Read that as a platform buyer and the question stops being technical. If the platform is the entity that contracts with the licensed operator, it is the final supplier, and the answer to “who needs the licence here?” may be the platform itself.
Decide who holds the licence before you decide what to build
The Commission’s test for who carries the licence is about control, and it lists the indicators it looks for:
- which company is responsible for the design and functionality of the software?
- which company is responsible for approving design changes?
- which company is responsible for the functionality and acceptance testing?
- which company is responsible for the quality assurance and regulatory compliance testing of the product?
- which company retains the intellectual property in the product?
- what the contract says in terms of responsibilities and liabilities.
The guidance then reduces the whole exercise to a commercial question: “we will be looking to determine whether the contract between the parties in essence involves purchase of a product or merely payment for time and expertise.” Buying a product puts the licence on the supplier; buying time and expertise under your own control puts it on you. Its illustration of the distinction is exactly the situation a platform creates when it commissions artwork or a theme: “Where the third party is only providing part of a game, such as artwork, under the control and design specifications of Company Y, then this indicates Company Y is in control and is the entity to hold a gambling software licence whereas the third party does not.”
This is why an exclusivity and commissioning conversation that stays commercial for six weeks and becomes technical in the last one is backwards. The ownership of the design and the ownership of the licence are the same decision seen twice, and a contract that is silent on the indicators above leaves the platform to reconstruct its position later, from a build it has already accepted. The Commission says as much in the same guidance: “We would expect information about the respective indicators will be contained within a commercial contract.”
| The arrangement | Where control sits | Who is likely to need the licence |
|---|---|---|
| Platform buys a finished title from a studio and redistributes it | Studio designed and built it | Studio; and the final supplier to a licensed operator may need one too |
| Platform specifies the game and a studio builds to those specifications | Platform | Platform, as the controlling party |
| Studio supplies only artwork or a theme to the platform’s own build | Platform | Platform |
| Platform’s group holds the IP but the group’s developer builds it | Depends on the arrangement | The Commission may treat them together under an umbrella licence, or require both |
None of that is a legal conclusion, and none of it can be settled by a supplier. It is the shape of the question the platform should put to its own advisers before the commission is placed, in the same way it would put a payment or data question to them. What a commission can do is make the question answerable: name the controlling party, list the acceptance and compliance responsibilities, and record who holds the IP.
Decide whether the platform also needs an operating licence
The second licence question is easier to miss because it sounds like something that only applies to operators. It does not. A gambling software licence authorises manufacture, supply, installation and adaptation; it does not authorise providing facilities for gambling. The Commission’s guidance puts the consequence plainly: “a business that holds a gambling software licence but also hosts a poker network or a games platform will also require a remote casino operating licence as it is responsible for the fairness of the gambling.”
For a platform that hosts the games it aggregates, that sentence is the difference between a catalogue entry and a regulated activity. Whether it applies depends on what the platform actually does — host, operate, or only pass software through — which is another reason to answer it in writing at commissioning rather than at launch.
One market means one published explanation of the rules
The reason a market-specific commission is harder than a generic one is that the explanation obligations attach to the market, not to the code. In Great Britain, RTS 3 requirement 3A states: “An explanation of the applicable rules must be easily available to the customer before they commit to gamble. The content including artwork and text must be accurate, and sufficient to explain all of the applicable rules and how to participate.” Requirement 3C adds that information enabling a customer to make an informed decision about their chances of winning — including the house edge or margin and the return to player percentage — “must be easily available before the customer commits to gamble”, and requirement 3D puts prizes and payouts in the same place and the same moment.
Two consequences fall out of that for the platform rather than the studio.
The first is that the artwork is not exempt. The requirement covers content “including artwork and text”, so a decorative rules panel that renders a different mathematics set, or a themed help screen that describes the world instead of the game, is an inaccurate artefact with the platform’s name in front of it. The rules specification guide and the math model and PAR sheet guide exist to keep those two things describing the same game.
The second is that the platform, as the party distributing into one market, has to name who authors and signs the published explanation in that market’s languages, and has to know which party owns the answer when the paytable changes. A commissioned title whose rules page is written once, in one language, and re-used across clients is a defect that arrives after the build, not during it.
Code the market; do not paint it
A platform distributing to several client brands runs into a quieter version of the same problem: the market, the language and the currency all have to be data, because the alternatives are hand-made and do not scale.
Country identity is a standard, not a design decision. ISO 3166 exists to “define internationally recognized codes of letters and/or numbers that we can use when we refer to countries and their subdivisions”, precisely so that a territory can be named unambiguously without depending on the language of the document naming it — which matters when the same grant has to be read by a client in one market and a supplier in another.
Language is the same story. BCP 47, the IETF’s Tags for identifying languages, describes “the structure, content, construction, and semantics of language tags for use in cases where it is desirable to indicate the language used in an information object”. A catalogue record that carries a language tag per presentation can be rendered consistently by every client; a title that ships with localized text baked into a single build cannot.
That is a commissioning constraint with a visible cost later. The localization architecture guide is where the structure for it lives; the platform’s contribution is to require the tags and codes as fields on the catalogue record rather than as text an artist drew.
Write down what the grant lets the platform do
The single most valuable page in a platform commission is not the brief and not the specification. It is the grant — the part of the agreement that says what the platform may do with the title it has paid for.
Exclusivity on the operator’s side is a commercial question with its own vocabulary, and it is covered elsewhere in the commissioning brief. What the platform has to add is the redistribution layer, which is a different set of questions:
- Territory. A list of markets, expressed in codes, rather than a phrase like “our markets”. The grant and the licence position have to name the same places.
- Sub-distribution. Whether the platform may present the title to its client operators, under whose brand, and whether those clients may change anything at all.
- What a client may re-skin. If the title is distributed to several brands, the grant should say which surfaces are theirs. A client-side change to the parts covered by the published rules or by the certified build is a change to the artefact, not to the marketing, and the certification submission guide is where the cost of that shows up.
- Term and end of term. What the platform may keep when the term ends, what it must remove, and what happens to the client brands that adopted the title in the meantime.
- The studio’s other clients. Whether the studio may place the same mechanics with a competing platform in the same market, and how close a derivative has to be before it counts.
Those are questions for the platform’s own counsel. The commission’s job is to make sure they are asked while the answer is still worth writing down.
Keep the release pack, and hand each client the same one
The last decision is the least glamorous and the one that decides whether the launch survives its second client. A platform that distributes a commissioned title has to hold, for the exact release it distributes, the material that describes what the game is: the versioned rules, the mathematics, the operating configuration and the test results for that build.
That is not paperwork for its own sake. It is what lets the platform answer a client’s question, a laboratory’s query or a regulator’s request about a title it did not write, and what stops a re-skin from silently detaching the published explanation from the mathematics it describes. The RGS integration requirements guide covers the integration contract that produces part of that pack; the platform’s own contribution is to require the pack as a deliverable, per release, and to keep the record of which client received which version.
For an operator or a platform working through a studio and platform partner, the useful form of this section is a short list with an owner for each line, not a folder that is assembled at launch.
Write the comparison before the commission, not after it
A commission is usually justified with a goal. “We need exclusive content” is a goal; it cannot be tested, and it cannot be wrong. A comparison is different, because it can be.
The comparison a platform can actually run is about the catalogue, not about the game being good: how many titles in the target market’s catalogue carry the language, the currency presentation and the rules content that market needs, counted before the commission and again after the title is live, against the same measurement. That number describes coverage, which is what a content commission changes. It does not describe player value, retention or revenue, and a launch that reports those as the effect of a commissioned title has published a conclusion it did not buy.
Two disciplines make the difference. Write the measurement — the market, the catalogue, the definition of a qualifying title — before the commission is placed, because a comparison chosen afterwards is a story. And keep the claim proportionate: a title can plausibly change what a catalogue offers; whether it changed anything about players is a separate question that needs a design the launch does not have on its own.
Responsible-gaming context belongs in the same plan rather than in a footnote, because publishing content into a market is not neutral: whichever party carries the responsible product design obligations for that market carries them at launch, and the responsible product design requirements are where the market-specific version of that work lives.
Questions platforms ask
Does the platform need a gambling software licence if a studio made the game?
It may, and the answer does not depend on who wrote the code. In Great Britain, LCCP condition 2.2.1 requires gambling software used by a licensed operator to have been manufactured, supplied, installed or adapted by the holder of a gambling software operating licence, and the Commission’s guidance states that the final supplier to a licensed operator needs a licence even performing no development, adaptation or installation activity. Where the platform buys a product, the studio’s position matters; where the platform controls the design, the platform’s does. Put the question to your own advisers with the contract in front of them.
Who decides which party is “in control” of the build?
The Commission lists the indicators: who is responsible for the design and functionality, who approves design changes, who runs functionality and acceptance testing, who runs quality assurance and compliance testing, who retains the intellectual property, and what the contract says about responsibilities and liabilities. Its own summary of the test is whether the contract is effectively a purchase of a product or payment for time and expertise. That is a question the commission’s contract can answer in advance, or leave to be reconstructed after delivery.
Can a client operator re-skin an exclusive title?
Only within the surfaces the grant and the published rules allow. A themed name or a lobby tile is a distribution detail; a change to the parts covered by the published explanation of the rules, or to the build that was tested, changes the artefact the operator is presenting. If the title is meant to serve several brands, write the re-skin boundary into the grant before the build, and check it against the certification requirements for the market.
What has to be published for a single-market exclusive title?
In Great Britain, RTS 3 requires an explanation of the applicable rules to be easily available before the customer commits to gamble, with content including artwork and text that must be accurate and sufficient to explain all of the applicable rules and how to participate; information supporting an informed decision about the chances of winning, including the house edge or margin and the return to player percentage; and content describing the prizes and payouts or how they are determined. Other markets set their own requirements. The commissioning decision is to name who authors and signs each of those in each launch language.
How should the platform prove the commission was worth doing?
By measuring the catalogue against the market’s requirement, not by measuring the game. Count the titles that carry the market’s language, currency presentation and rules content before the commission and again after the title is live, using the same definition of a qualifying title, and write that definition down first. That produces something checkable about content coverage. Claims about retention, player value or revenue need a controlled comparison the launch does not create on its own, so report them as observations rather than results.
