Licensed role-playing game

A licensed role-playing game is one that based on existing intellectual property (IP), e.g. from film, television, comics or books. Licensed games use the concepts, setting, and (often) characters of the existing intellectual property in their marketing and system, with the permission of the franchise's owners. They are called licensed because the rights to the intellectual property must be licensed (purchased temporarily) from the owners of that intellectual property, unless the intellectual property is in the public domain.

To license an IP to create a game, a role-playing game company and the owners of the IP (the licensor) will make a contract allowing the RPG company to use the IP. For the duration of the contract, the RPG company can use the contracted parts of the IP (within certain restrictions that the licensor may place on it) in their game and collect revenue from sales of that game. Once the contract is over, rights to the IP revert to the owners, which almost always means that neither the game publisher (who owns copyright on the game itself but not IP within it) nor the IP owner can sell or distribute the game. As a result, games out of license typically go out of print.

A game design company may want to license an IP for their game because they expect that the appeal and existing audience of the IP will increase the marketability of their game. However, there are also additional costs involved with licensing, including usually a payment to the licensor as well as additional costs in production as any use of the IP can be reviewed and perhaps changed by the licensor.

Other games may be based on or inspired by existing intellectual property without referring to it explicitly in the text, thus avoiding the need to license the intellectual property. These are not considered to be licensed games. For instance, For the Honor is inspired by the television series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, an inspiration that is explicit in the marketing of the game, e.g. its Kickstarter, but the game itself does not use any of the intellectual property from that series (setting, locations, characters, powers, etc.) and is therefore not a licensed game.