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https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/39296/icv2-interview-asmodee-execs-counterfeiting


How many consumer dollars in hobby games that were counterfeit were sold last year or in the last six months or any period you want to use?

Petersen: We feel, and this number is speculative (but it's going to be somewhere on that range), that Asmodee North America’s sales are going to be affected somewhere between five and ten million dollars, this year alone. We believe for some games, that more than 70% of all sales in the U.S. market have been counterfeit.



Every day, we buy a number of different products from major online sites to understand whether some listings are counterfeit or not. Some counterfeits are very obvious, some of it's harder to tell. The products that are most affected, really, are the products that are generally the most popular. Obviously, our top 50 products, but there are probably others that are affected, but we haven’t discovered it yet.

We’ve seen Catan heavily affected by counterfeiting, Ticket to Ride, and 7 Wonders are others.

Both interesting and surprising.

I know it's a long standing problem in the tabletop world, but I wasn't aware the bootleggers were going after the actual board game market.

What's especially baffling is those people chasing after the cheapest price can probably get a better deal at any of the big chain stores with a bit of smart planning and coupon use.

Barnes and Noble's constant coupons could net it, or Target's _% off games deals + red card = big savings.

I'm of two minds to this.

One, just like many manufacturers, ah...highly inclined to protect the exclusivity of their IP, Asmodee probably has a very loose view of what would constitute "counterfeiting" of a game. This would probably include someone handmaking custom high-quality hexagonal tiles and selling them on pinterest, or someone making fancy custom resource tokens to use in place of the regular cards, etc.

On the other hand, there probably is a market for low-quality straight up knockoffs of these games because quite frankly jsut like with miniatures when you're unscrupulus enough to cut out the actual brainwork that went into coming up with the game, or the creativity that went into making the art, the cardboard and cards that go into a game box are usually really low cost. Don't pay the designers by way of ripping off someone else's product, voila, you've got a way to sell it for way cheaper for more profit. This of course scummy in the extreme.

In general, Asmodee is kind of a crappy monopoly (no pun intended) at this point and I do expect to see a lot of these issues come out as scapegoats as the more grass-roots, kickstarter-based board game industry rot the established publisher-based game industry from the inside out. Just like you see in other industries, when the 800 pound gorilla starts to throw its legal weight around, you know the industry in general is likely ripe for or already undergoing a major structural change.

Fascinating. If the online price is too good to be true, this is probably why.

EDIT: Thinking on this, I actually have to chuckle at how incredibly easy it would be to do something like make a counterfeit monopoly game or something like that. It'd be like hiding a slightly differently colored piece of hay in a haystack.

Take a game with the same basic shaped board, that uses the same components (paper money in the right denominations and six-sided dice) and call it "Anything-ply" rather than "Anything-opoly".

Then, in the rulebook of the game, create an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT game using the same components. Make the rules wholly distinct.

99% of the people who buy the box would just play monopoly with it, and would never crack the rulebook open.

70% of sales in the U.S for some games being counterfeited is very hard to believe.

Seems like the old industrial tactic of exagerating the extent of a problem

I also suspect there's a whole bunch of counterfitting they don't mention,

some of the Chinese factories running out some/loads of extra copies of stuff when they do a print run (a fair number of places that do electronics have been caught doing this, along with selling on QC failures to places that get them just about working for sale as grey market imports)

Hadn't thought of counting stuff like third party meeples, storage components, carrying cases and the like as "illegal," like the Scotsman mentioned.

I wonder if that's lumping in resellers and liquidators as well, since IELLO doesn't get a cut.

Does evoke certain shades of GW though, doesn't it?

 streetsamurai wrote:
70% of sales in the U.S for some games being counterfeited is very hard to believe.

Seems like the old industrial tactic of exagerating the extent of a problem

I actually believe them, industry has always been pretty good at estimating the number of fakes, illegal downloads, etc

where they get silly is saying that a significant proportion of the buyers/downloaders of cheap/free dodgy goods would instead buy the real thing if they couldn't get the cheap stuff. Very few really would

Considering that they acknowledge that calculating the number of counterfeited copies sold is very hard if not impossible, them coming up with such an extravagant number makes me very skeptical

Yep, this is a rather silly article...

One, just like many manufacturers, ah...highly inclined to protect the exclusivity of their IP, Asmodee probably has a very loose view of what would constitute "counterfeiting" of a game. This would probably include someone handmaking custom high-quality hexagonal tiles and selling them on pinterest, or someone making fancy custom resource tokens to use in place of the regular cards, etc.

Yeah, this was my thought. It's not hard to see some companies chasing the Apple model and claiming any third party tokens or card holders or whatever are "counterfeiting" their game.

IIRC there was some talk in the Knight Models rumor thread about that company going after an etsy shop that made little MDF trays to hold cards and tokens as "infringing on their IP". The industry is just nuts over this stuff.

There's no point in threads like these, since you can't actually discuss the matter. One "side" of the debate can throw around terms like "parasite", "ripoff", "scum" and so on, and anyone with a more nuanced position - not even opposite, just not vehemently pro corporate IP law - can't make their argument because the mods can swoop in and declare they're "promoting IP infringement" or whatever.

I've quite happily advocated a less stringent attitude towards recasts in many a thread, seldom, if ever, run foul of moderation.

I guess it boils down to how the arguments are presented.

I wonder how they're estimating the 70%...

So I found this part of the article interesting:

We knew that counterfeiting was becoming a major issue last year, but it really has become a critical industry issues, and has really done a lot of damage over the last ten months.

How do you quantify that problem? What kind of games is it the biggest problem with?
Christian: Quantifying is difficult without data. We are currently working with a number of online outlets to try to understand…

So, they do not have any hard data on counterfeiting ? They (Asmodee) cite drops in sales of games that have been on the market for years (market saturation maybe?), and complaints on BoardgameGeek over poor quality components (perhaps their own failure in quality control?) as evidence. The article reads more like a defense for the MAP policy they are trying to enforce against online sellers such as miniature market et al.

 streetsamurai wrote:
70% of sales in the U.S for some games being counterfeited is very hard to believe.

Seems like the old industrial tactic of exagerating the extent of a problem

Yeah, I find that hard to believe unless they're counting/blindly guessing about Chinese online markets like Tao bao that serve customers who mainly wouldn't purchase anyways.

I was really surprised to hear board games were being counterfeited. With so many parts and pieces you would think the cost verses the pay off would be super small..
But if you are in a country that allows that kind of thing.. You just get the company give you the original files, produce it for them and print off your own copies to sale..
Maybe this will help restart game manufactures here in the states again... but I think cost will always win out... don't matter what happens.

Are games like Catan and Ticket to Ride pretty easy to counterfeit? How is that possible? They are staples of discount shelves everywhere--there's not much point to trying to undercut Target's prices.

Or are they really suggesting that any drop in sales must be due to piracy? because I've heard that somewhere before...


Man, I just can't wrap my mind around what the underground boardgame market would even look like. "Real Monopolis Thimbles Cheap! Buy now, my friend!" "scrabble tiles sold by weight, all letters for pennies." "Chewie here tells me you're looking for Passage to Ride, but you want to avoid any trademark intanglements."

 Azreal13 wrote:
I've quite happily advocated a less stringent attitude towards recasts in many a thread, seldom, if ever, run foul of moderation.

I guess it boils down to how the arguments are presented.

Does it? I'd say the rule is so broad it depends rather more on which mod happens to wander into the thread - some will find a given argument perfectly fine, others will decide it deserves a warning, and there's no grounds to challenge that since it's down to their interpretation.

Given the number of occasions the topic's come up in the approaching 6 years I've been posting, and therefore the number of different mods who've likely seen my posts in those threads, I'd say yes it does.

 Yodhrin wrote:
There's no point in threads like these, since you can't actually discuss the matter. One "side" of the debate can throw around terms like "parasite", "ripoff", "scum" and so on, and anyone with a more nuanced position - not even opposite, just not vehemently pro corporate IP law - can't make their argument because the mods can swoop in and declare they're "promoting IP infringement" or whatever.

Isn't that exactly what's happening in this thread?

From a baseline level, the activity of "competing" as a business by entirely copying the design of a product and being able to drastically cut the price because you don't need to pay the artistic designers (i.e. recasting) is by definition parasitic business. It is no different from benefitting from another person's work by stealing a physical product and re-selling it, or replicating a counterfeit product like a purse or a watch.

Where the line is for me is when people sculpt their own versions of models/games or game pieces to compete. Those people are benefiting from the work of others in that they have established a consumer interest, but there's nothing wrong with taking an existing concept in the market and improving on it or delivering a similar product for a competitive price as long as you're not going to do that by stealing others' work directly.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Are games like Catan and Ticket to Ride pretty easy to counterfeit? How is that possible? They are staples of discount shelves everywhere--there's not much point to trying to undercut Target's prices.

Or are they really suggesting that any drop in sales must be due to piracy? because I've heard that somewhere before...


Man, I just can't wrap my mind around what the underground boardgame market would even look like. "Real Monopolis Thimbles Cheap! Buy now, my friend!" "scrabble tiles sold by weight, all letters for pennies." "Chewie here tells me you're looking for Passage to Ride, but you want to avoid any trademark intanglements."

Even at a discount, games like Catan and Ticket to Ride in my experience at least rarely go lower than 25$, which is nowhere near the cost of production if you go for cheap cardboard and plastic bits.

For a lot of their bigger products, Asmodee has already made ripoffs so easy with the sheer ridiculous volume of pasted-on themes they put on their bigger titles like Monopoly and (weirdly) Munchkin. There are probably literally hundreds of Asmodee-manufactured monopoly themes. Throwing in a ripoff one you could easily make it just impossible to spot.

I'd be curious to know which games they think are being counterfeited most. Just what makes up that 70%?

I just took a look at my regular sources for other counterfeit items and saw:
Dixit
Sushi Go
Twister
Jenga
Guess Who

and the last two were very obviously fakes with different names.
Lots of Dixit and its expansions.

No other major games, that I saw.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
I'd be curious to know which games they think are being counterfeited most. Just what makes up that 70%?

Yeah, that's a huge number and I'm pretty skeptical about it, particularly since they admit to not having data to back it up...

Been buying board games for over thirty years. Not alone have I never seen a counterfeit game I've never even really heard it discussed as a topic before.

This figure seems crazy. Literally pulled from thin air.

I think it's referring to some specific titles, not all games across the board

Ashitaka wrote:
I just took a look at my regular sources for other counterfeit items and saw:
Dixit
Sushi Go
Twister
Jenga
Guess Who

and the last two were very obviously fakes with different names.
Lots of Dixit and its expansions.

No other major games, that I saw.

Fakes with different names? That's not what counterfeiting means. You can buy cheap knock offs of popular games legitimately in any discount store. Selling generic not-[name] games is legal and a common practice.


As for the others, I have to admit I'm surprised.
What kind of a world supports a black market for Twister?

 RiTides wrote:

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
I'd be curious to know which games they think are being counterfeited most. Just what makes up that 70%?

Yeah, that's a huge number and I'm pretty skeptical about it, particularly since they admit to not having data to back it up...

We’ve seen Catan heavily affected by counterfeiting, Ticket to Ride, and 7 Wonders are others.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
I think it's referring to some specific titles, not all games across the board

Yep -

We believe for some games, that more than 70% of all sales in the U.S. market have been counterfeit.

the_scotsman wrote:
For a lot of their bigger products, Asmodee has already made ripoffs so easy with the sheer ridiculous volume of pasted-on themes they put on their bigger titles like Monopoly and (weirdly) Munchkin. There are probably literally hundreds of Asmodee-manufactured monopoly themes. Throwing in a ripoff one you could easily make it just impossible to spot.

What? Those aren't Asmodee games. Monopoly is a Hasbro title, and most of the alternately-branded versions are produced under license by a company called USAopoly. Munchkin is the property of Steve Jackson Games, with a few versions also produced under license by USAopoly. Asmodee mostly does orginal titles, though their imprint Fantasy Flight definitely reskins games from time to time (Descent, Talisman, etc.).