What's the difference between a branded game and gamification?

A branded game is a real game — designed, scoped, and built from scratch — that carries your brand's mechanic, voice, and goal. Gamification is a design technique: bolting points, badges, or streaks onto a non-game flow (onboarding, training, a checkout). The two solve different problems. If you want a thing people choose to play, you want a branded game. If you want to nudge behavior inside an existing product, you want gamification.