Ryan Dancey & AEG Part Ways Following AI Comments

COO says that AI could make any of the company's games.
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Ryan Dancey, the Chief Operating Officer of boardgame publisher Alderac Entertainment Group, no longer works for the company, following statements on social media where he claimed that AI could make most of the company's board games, and that D&D and Magic: the Gathering were the only new forms of gameplay in his lifetime. After another poster on LinkedIn claimed that "AI wouldn't come up with Tiny Towns or Flip Seven or Cubitos because it doesn't understand the human element of fun", Dancey responded that he had zero reason to believe that AI could not do such a thing.

"I have zero reason to believe that an Al couldn't come up with Tiny Towns or Flip Seven or Cubitos. I can prompt any of several Als RIGHT NOW and get ideas for games as good as those. The gaming industry doesn't exist because humans create otherwise unobtainable ideas. It exists because many many previous games exist, feed into the minds of designers, who produce new variants on those themes. People then apply risk capital against those ideas to see if there's a product market fit. Sometimes there is, and sometimes there is not. (In fact, much more often than not).

Extremely occasionally (twice in my lifetime: D&D and Magic: the Gathering) a human has produced an all new form of gaming entertainment. Those moments are so rare and incandescent that they echo across decades.

Game publishing isn't an industry of unique special ideas. It's an industry about execution, marketing, and attention to detail. All things Als are great at."
- Ryan Dancey​

The Cardboard Herald, a boardgame reviews channel, responded yesterday on BlueSky that "As you may have seen, [AEG] CEO Ryan Dancey stated that AI can make games “just as good as Tiny Towns or Flip 7 or Cubitos”, completely missing the inexorable humanity involved.We’ve spent 10 years celebrating creatives in the industry. Until he’s gone we will not work with AEG."

Today, AEG's CEO John Zinser stated "Today I want to share that Ryan Dancey and AEG have parted ways.This is not an easy post to write. Ryan has been a significant part of AEG’s story, and I am personally grateful for the years of work, passion, and intensity he brought to the company. We have built a lot together. As AEG moves into its next chapter, leadership alignment and clarity matter more than ever. This transition reflects that reality.Our commitment to our designers, partners, retailers, and players remains unchanged. We will continue building great games through collaboration, creativity, and trust."

Dancey himself posted "This morning [John Zinser] and I talked about the aftermath of my post yesterday about the ability of AI to create ideas for games. He's decided that it's time for me to move on to new adventures. Sorry to have things end like this. I've enjoyed my 10 years at AEG. I wish the team there the best in their future endeavors.

I believe we're at a civilizational turning point. That who we are and how we are is going to change on the order of what happened during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions; and it's past time we started talking about it and not being afraid to discuss the topic. Talking about AI, being honest about what it can and cannot do, and thinking about the implications is something we have to begin to do in a widespread way. Humans have a unique creative spark that differentiates us and makes us special and we should celebrate that specialness as we experience this epic change.

For the record: I do not believe that AI will replace the work talented game designer/developers do, nor do I think it is appropriate to use AI to replace the role of designer/developers in the publication of tabletop games. During my time at AEG I developed and implemented polices and contracts that reflect those views. It's important to me that you know what I believe and what I don't believe on this particular topic, despite what you may have read elsewhere."

Whatever your position on generative LLMs and the like, when the COO of your company announces publicly that all of the company’s games could have been made by AI, it’s a problem. UK readers may recall when major jewelry chain Ratners’ CEO Gerald Ratner famously announced that the products sold in his stores were “trash”, instantly wiping half a billion pounds from the company’s value back in the early 1990s. The company was forced to close stores and rebrand to Signet Group. At the time the Ratners Group was the world's biggest jewelry retailer. Ratner himself was forced to resign in 1992. The act of making a damaging statement about the quality of your own company’s products became known as “doing a Ratner”.

Dancey was VP of Wizards of the Coast when the company acquired TSR, the then-owner of Dungeons & Dragons. He is also known for being the architect of the Open Game License. Dancey has worked as Chief Operating Officer for AEG for 10 years, and was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the company, second-in-command after the CEO, John Zinser.
 

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But you do see how saying "the problem is competitive systems" (talking about the the problem of RPGs in general), taken together with the idea that you want to drive D&D PHB sales as high as possible, basically means that the best course of action is to do something that will drive all other systems than D&D from the market. Which might not be a problem for you if you like to play D&D; but if you're not into D&D, it sounds pretty offensive.
I disagree. If you agree that, as Ryan said, the problem with the proliferation of systems was the resulting industry wide low sales because no one had the pull to attract enough new customers to TTRPGs for the hobby to survive, then the consequence of that environment persisting would be that many of them go out of business, and probably sooner rather than later. So as someone who likes other systems, you would not want to stay in that environment either (even though your solution as to how to get out of it might differ).

In turn having one large player in the market that does attract new customers to the hobby at large, even if initially to their own system, would benefit the market overall, including the competing systems (the rising tide idea).

Also, you still put the cart before the horse with your 'if you want to increase PHB sales you should drive other systems from the market', Dancey is saying the reverse. WotC selling more D&D books (the best course of action for this was having more products for D&D through the OGL...) indirectly will reduce sales of competing systems over time, as they cannot keep up with the network effect that is working in favor of D&D due to its position in the hobby.

He mentioned this just before the part I quoted

"Here's the logic in a nutshell. We've got a theory that says that D&D is the most popular role playing game because it is the game more people know how to play than any other game. (For those of you interested researching the theory, this concept is called "The Theory of Network Externalities")."

and picks it up again in the part I quoted

"the more money other companies spend on their games, the more D&D sales are eventually made. Now, there are clearly issues of efficiency - not every dollar input to the market results in a dollar output in D&D sales; and there is a substantial time lag between input and output; and a certain amount of people are diverted from D&D to other games never to return. However, we believe very strongly that the net effect of the competition in the RPG genre is positive for D&D."
 

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Buddy, those are both "evil" goals.
Selling more products is not generally considered an evil goal, and that is really all Ryan was saying. I doubt you would consider it evil if some company managed to sell cars for $20k that rival Fords or Mercedes or whatever 50k cars. Is them getting Ford / Mercedes market share as a result of that evil? No, it is a consequence of having a product that more people prefer over the competition
 


What were Dancey's shenanigans during the TSR acquisition? How did Dancey crash and burn with D&D 3.5? What happened with Eve Online and Pathfinder Online?

Not that I'm doubting your list of negative Dancey events . . . I'm honestly not familiar with most things on the list!
I withdraw the Eve Online aspect, as I could not verify my memory of a controversy there with a quick search, but I will add that he had to resign in disgrace as Treasurer of GAMA after a corruption scandal.

As to those others:

  • While D&D fans are won't to romanticize WotC White Knkghting D&D, it started AEG and specifically Ryan Dancey lying to Lorraine Williams and TSR and Trojan Horsing WotC as the real buyers. Kind of a scummy business situation.
  • Dancey was in charge of D&D on the business side for 3E. In 2002, he was fired and 3.5 dropped in 2003...because the first go of 3E crashed and burned under Dancey.
  • Pathfinder Online was Dancey's baby, but ended up being one of the more epic failed Kickstarter projects that is...a bit much to go into here. But they managed to burn a lot of players, Dancey parachute out in 2015 as the project catered after delivering on approximately none of their promises that people paid for.
 

Claude code uses models like Sonnet or Opus, so issues you have with the training apply.

No, they don't.

Simply put - you don't go looking for cancer in medical imaging, or paths over Martian terrain with a LANGUAGE model.

The costs and huge computing power needed are largely dependent on the size of the training data set, which for LLMs is freakin' enormous, because it is trying to model the entire language at once, and so use pretty much anything ever written in modern English.

Smaller, focused science models can use smaller, focused data sets (that also generally aren't swiped from people who have rights to them), and can be trained at the faction of the expense.
 


I withdraw the Eve Online aspect, as I could not verify my memory of a controversy there with a quick search, but I will add that he had to resign in disgrace as Treasurer of GAMA after a corruption scandal.

As to those others:

  • While D&D fans are won't to romanticize WotC White Knkghting D&D, it started AEG and specifically Ryan Dancey lying to Lorraine Williams and TSR and Trojan Horsing WotC as the real buyers. Kind of a scummy business situation.
  • Dancey was in charge of D&D on the business side for 3E. In 2002, he was fired and 3.5 dropped in 2003...because the first go of 3E crashed and burned under Dancey.
  • Pathfinder Online was Dancey's baby, but ended up being one of the more epic failed Kickstarter projects that is...a bit much to go into here. But they managed to burn a lot of players, Dancey parachute out in 2015 as the project catered after delivering on approximately none of their promises that people paid for.
I respect your own recall of events, but . . . I'm taking all of that with a grain of salt without more solid links. Not that you need to worry about solving my curiosity, it's just that I don't recall any of that . . . of course, it's been a long while.

D&D 3.5 came only 3 years after 3.0 . . . but did 3.0 "crash and burn" due to something Dancey did or didn't do? Personally, as opposed to being on the team?

Dancey lied to TSR executives to grease the acquisition by WotC? I don't remember any of that! My google-search skills are weak, and I wasn't able to find anything about that either.

I do remember the spectacular failure of the Pathfinder Online game . . . Dancey was most certainly involved with that mess . . . but was the failure specifically tied to Dancey? Or to the team Dancey was a part of?

What I do know about Dancey is that he tends towards AI-evangelism, arrogance, sexism . . . and a tendency to tweet first, think later. All of that is enough, I think, to keep him off my personal "respected folks in the industry" list, despite my appreciation of his work on the OGL.
 

Except that it has. All other RPGs are rounding errors compared to the popularity of D&D. Hell, some older editions of D&D are more popular than some “really popular” modern, in-print and fully supported games.
Actually, that doesn't bother me that much ... they may be rounding errors, but they are there, which is sufficient for me.

I'm not bitter about how it all turned out - it's more that the whole "let's see how the market works and do what is required to come out on top" approach is kind of off-putting to me, as "realistic" as it may be. I'm much more a fan of "let's do what we feel is good/right/fun and see how we make it work without going broke" approach. Of course, in some cases, both will lead to the same results ...
 

I'm much more a fan of "let's do what we feel is good/right/fun and see how we make it work without going broke" approach.
I think everyone is, but that's not a realistic strategy to openly voice at a publicly traded company.

"Hey, man, let's not worry about profits" ends in being escorted out of the building by security before the sentence is complete.

It sucks, but I think being mad at people trapped in that system is misplaced anger.
 

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