White-label games for publishers: build, license or embed?

What are the three models?

Publishers that offer online games follow one of three models, sometimes combined.

The line between licensing and white-label is blurry: most suppliers offer both. The real questions are who produces the content, who runs the technology and who owns the relationship with the player.

Building in-house: control, at what cost?

Building in-house gives you a unique game, fully on brand, with complete control over data and experience. Bloomberg chose this route for Alphadots, a daily word puzzle conceived by crossword constructor Jeff Chen and designed and built by Bloomberg (Bloomberg Media, September 2025). The New York Times, which made games a pillar of its subscription, is the extreme case of this model; see NYT Games and subscriptions.

The cost goes well beyond the initial build. A daily game requires:

• a product and engineering team to design, test and maintain it on mobile and desktop;
• content production every single day, with editing;
• tooling for analytics, player accounts, streaks and leaderboards;
• protection against cheating if you show leaderboards.

Few titles have those resources. INA's La Revue des médias notes that most outlets "do not have an in-house puzzle setter." Those that do, such as Le Nouvel Obs, usually rely on an author for content, not on a dedicated product team.

A variant is acquiring a game that already exists. The Atlantic brought in Bracket City, an independent game, in April 2025; its daily plays have more than tripled since, according to the magazine (Editor & Publisher, June 2025).

Licensing puzzles or modules: the historical model

Licensing is the most common model in the French press. According to INA, many titles from the Prisma, Reworld and Ouest-France groups use RCI Jeux, and Le Parisien sources part of its games there.

RCI Jeux describes itself as a game creator for more than 40 years and delivers turnkey games adapted to each client's audience and brand (RCI-Jeux). Its web offer, on a page dated 2016, covers games hosted on its servers, embedded by iframe with the client's logo and colors, and administered by RCI (RCI-Jeux, Triple Play). That is white-label in all but name.

Internationally, the market is consolidating. Keesing Media Group, which calls itself the world's largest puzzle and braintainment company, acquired HTML5 studio CoolGames in 2023 so its media clients could offer "a much broader selection of both puzzles and casual games" (CoolGames, July 2023).

Other suppliers sell a tool rather than a catalog. Amuse Labs' PuzzleMe lets you create your own puzzles and embed them on your site, with customizable colors, fonts and masthead, plus built-in analytics. It features testimonials from The Washington Post and The Boston Globe (Amuse Labs).

Finally, Arkadium claims more than 200 games and says its titles power the games sections of USA Today, AARP, The Washington Post, Microsoft and The Independent (Arkadium). Again, that is the supplier's own description.

How do cost and time compare?

None of these suppliers publishes a price list, and we will not invent one. The differences are best read as rough orders of magnitude:

Building in-house makes sense when the game is meant to become a product in its own right, with a team to keep it alive. To test your audience's appetite or launch a games section quickly, licensing or white-label is the more reasonable choice. The related revenue models are covered in monetizing online games.

What should you ask a supplier?

Before signing, check at least the following:

• language: are word games designed in the target language, with a suitable dictionary, or translated?
• refresh: is there a new puzzle every day, the same for everyone?
• styling: colors, fonts, logo, dark theme;
• player identity: do readers need an account with the supplier, or can they play with their account on your site?
• data: which stats do you get, who owns them, what happens when the contract ends?
• security: who can embed your games on sites other than yours?
• references: clients you can actually call, rather than aggregate figures.

Where does SIWA fit?

SIWA is a white-label platform for daily games. In practice:

• 16 word and logic games, including word games designed in French, with a new puzzle every day, the same for everyone;
• iframe embedding, one line of code to paste on your page, with your space set up within 24 hours;
• a dedicated subdomain and styling in your colors, with logo, font, light and dark themes;
• an allowlist of domains, so your games can only be embedded on your own sites;
• optional features: streaks, leaderboards, leagues, archives, timer, player accounts;
• the option to let readers play with their account on your site, without creating a SIWA account;
• a dashboard with daily active users, sessions, completion rate and top games.

As with any white-label solution, SIWA means handing technology and content to a supplier. Integration steps are in the integration guide, and the offer is on the SIWA for business page.