Protecting Original Games and the Revenue Behind Them
How The Op Games maintains control of its games as they move from creation to play.
The Op Games
The best games are the original ones: meant for crowded tables, slightly bent cards, and a permanent place on the shelf — the kind you remember to pack first into a box with each move.
But when a game succeeds, imitation inevitably arises out of visibility, especially in the age of social media and AI. Copying is cheaper and travels faster than craftsmanship, and the duplicate sometimes gets to the customer before the original has a chance.
With MarqVision, The Op Games reduced counterfeit listings within weeks, focused enforcement where it mattered most, and recovered measurable commercial value — not only by removing imitations, but by helping authentic products reach customers first.Because when the original is easy to find, customers rarely prefer the copy.
Since 1994, The Op Games has built licensed board games around some of the world’s most recognizable stories and brands. What began with specialty Monopoly editions expanded into hundreds of titles across thousands of variations, each one designed for a specific fan base and a specific kind of joy.
Inside their headquarters sits an archive of nearly every game they’ve produced, preserved not out of nostalgia, but practicality. When a piece goes missing, they replace it. When a component fails, they make it right.
Responsibility, in their view, continues after the sale — all the way through the unbroken moments of playing with a great tame.
Then came Tapple. Early sales hovered around 40,000 units per year. Respectable, until a TikTok video appeared.
One video turned into many, and eventually sales saw explosive growth:
- 40K → 340K units
- Then 700K
- Then 1.4 million
- Then higher still
It reached #1 in Amazon’s board game category. Marketplace demand spilled across retailers, distributors, and regions. A July spike, which was normally off-season, matched the entirely of their Q4 search volume. Inventory that should have lasted months sold out in two weeks. All this is wonderful for growth, but also extremely informative for counterfeiters.
Soon, poorly made, defective, and breakable counterfeits followed.
Now The Op Games had two problems at once:
- Meet explosive demand
- Fight exploding imitation that caused false returns and reviews
The effort required to track what was happening continued to grow.
Listings appeared across multiple platforms and regions. Sellers shifted identities. Marketplaces operated in unfamiliar languages. Monitoring activity demanded sustained attention as the losses quickly mounted.
On one marketplace alone, five counterfeit listings sold 17,000 units in 30 days. Had those been authentic, they would have generated roughly $375,000 — representing 15% of that SKU’s monthly revenue.
During one Amazon stockout window, counterfeit sellers filled the gap and contributed to an estimated $600K revenue impact — while also dragging down ratings with poor product quality under the same listing pages.
Star ratings, search rank, and conversions also fell, which meant more potential customers redirected away from the original games.
Meanwhile counterfeit sellers demonstrated increasing sophistication:
- Title variations to avoid wordmark enforcement
- Logo misuse workarounds
- Marketplace cross-listing within days of TikTok creator spikes
- Attempts to hijack brand registry credentials
- Trademark filings in foreign jurisdictions
It wasn’t random behavior. They were watching.
The Op’s protection team numbered three when all this was happening, whereas effectively monitoring this manually at a global scale would have required ten times the number of people.
Listings spread across Amazon, TikTok Shop, Temu, Alibaba, DHGate, Etsy, eBay, and more. Each platform had different rules, signals, and workflows. Manual detection could not scale to viral velocity.
MarqVision introduced scaled detection, OCR, smart rules, and automated enforcement triggers across marketplaces. The Op fed field intelligence into the system. Detection expanded. Enforcement accelerated. Counterfeit visibility dropped.
Before MarqVision, detections averaged roughly 500 per year.
After implementation: ~500 per week.
Factories and customer support teams noticed the difference. Marketplace clutter reduced, and enforcement became systematic instead of chaotic after each product launch.
MarqVision — alongside MarqLaw’s support in trademark and registry recovery — helped The Op Games reclaim control where it mattered most: product visibility, listing integrity, and enforceable ownership. Finally, revenue was flowing in the right direction again.
Today, most of the protection work for the Op Games stays invisible — which is exactly how good infrastructure behaves.
The box, the pieces, and the rules are all ready to help the next player unfold a new unbroken moment. When originality is properly protected, no one talks about the protection. They just play.
Is your brand facing the same risks?
Request your free consultation with MarqVision and start building your brand protection strategy today.
