With the leaps in technological innovations, its no surprise that gamesespecially hypercasual games with one of the widest appealshave become an effective marketing channel for brands. Unfortunately, one of the most common challenges that brands face with gamified marketing is knowing where to start.
It can be costly to hire professionals to create a game from scratcheven more, ensuring that your marketing efforts will pay off. This is where game licensing and game rebranding come in.
Game Licensing vs. Game Rebranding
Game licensing and game rebranding can seem similar, especially in how they can be used to achieve similar goals in brand marketing. However, there are key differences between the two.
What is game licensing?
With game licensing, your brand pays for a license to use and host a specific game on your app, website, or platform. Instead of creating a game from scratch, you can easily select from a game publisher/distributors extensive library of games and use them for your campaigns immediately.
What is game rebranding?
For game rebranding, your brand works with a game publisher to customize an existing game with your brand elements like brand name, logo, color palette, and other related visuals. The resulting game is similar in mechanics to the base game, but can appear more unique because of the branded imagery.
What kind of gamified marketing should your brand choose?
Deciding which approach to use will depend on your specific business needs and campaign objectives.
Game licensing gives your brand access to pre-existing, high-quality games that are immediately playable by your audiences. This makes it best suited for achieving goals such as improving app/platform stickiness, boosting user engagement, and increasing conversions.
Meanwhile, game rebranding creates a familiar yet distinct game, thanks to the addition of your brand elements. Because of the resulting game, this approach is best suited for achieving goals such as boosting engagement from existing customers, expanding brand reach, improving brand recall, and creating hype and buzz around a product/service.
Wrapping Up
With hypercasual games widening the audience scope for games, marketing with games has become an effective strategy. Game licensing and gamer rebranding are ways that brandsregardless of industrycan leverage the channel without needing to specialize in game development.
Get a better understanding of how game licensing and game branding work by downloading our free ebook, Why Games are the Future of Marketing.
