Counterfeit games

Polygon features Counterfeiters have gone from handbags to board games, and they’re getting faster:

Over the last few decades, as brick-and-mortar retail has struggled and online shopping has become the norm, an entire ecosystem of counterfeit merchandise sellers has sprung up to prey on unwary consumers. Now, after years spent moving illicit shoes, hot handbags, and poorly made electronics, they’ve begun targeting board games.

This seems to be happening because of the big tech marketplace like Amazon, Google or eBay where vendors self-register and list their items without anyone verifying. When you can list products with computer errors as description it’s not a surprise that listing counterfeit is easy.

And this is affecting small indy publishers. And it even happen that the counterfeits are available before the actual release, showing that it’s lucrative enough to try to make fakes out of unreleased material. And then the copy, usually sold for much less, is of poor quality (missing components, poor manufacturing, etc.) and this hurts the customers as well.