Ryan Dancey & AEG Part Ways Following AI Comments

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.

 

[bedir than]

I don't think Dancey's intent was to slam AEG's designers specifically . . . but rather AI, in his opinion, can create games just as well as humans, not just within AEG but industry wide. He used AEG games as examples, because those are the games he is likely most familiar with.

I disagree with Dancey's opinion, but I think it's a fair opinion for him to hold. Very stupid to tweet though. Career suicide, and deservedly so. He definitely pulled a Ratner!

Dancey seems to be a tech-forward guy. His inspiration for the OGL back in the day was open-source software. And his opinion on AI in creative endeavors saddens me, but does not surprise me. He's getting a lot of vitriol on Redditt for it, excessively so, IMO.

Thanks for the OGL Ryan, hopefully you land on your feet after leaving AEG. And hopefully you'll think twice before tweeting next time.

His statement also makes me wary of any other endeavor he takes.
Because we now know he will use gen AI to build creative projects.

 

[HatWearingFool]

Indeed.

I literally attended a training session last week and again yesterday because we are now required to use AI to generate our epics, features, stories, and to prioritize them. Basically my job and the jobs of my peers who had to be on that call. And they wonder why we weren't all excited to "embrace AI".

I think anyone that works in software/tech has been in multiple meetings where they were basically told they will be replaced in the not to distant future.

We just aren’t used to it, but threatening people that they can be/will be easily replaced by someone who will do it cheaper has been a mainstay of capitalism for quite a while. Don’t unionize or we’ll move the jobs, take the pay cut or we’ll just fire you and replace you with someone cheaper, or if you won’t work the over time we’ll find someone who will.

The tactic has just moved up the skill chain and high skilled employees are shocked because they didn’t think it would happen to them.

I think it was Goldman Sacks that was in the journal last week talking about how in 5 years all their financial analysts would be replaced by AI and it’s only going to take that long because they need to replace their internal software with software that allows AI agents to do the jobs. Basically telling thousands of high paid people they should prepare to be unemployed within 5 years.

Also from the journal:

“Anthropic safety researcher Mrinank Sharma said this week that he was leaving the company to explore a poetry degree, writing in a letter to colleagues that the “world is in peril” from AI, among other dangers. Last month, he published a paper that found that advanced AI tools can disempower users and distort their sense of reality. Anthropic says it is grateful for Sharon’s work”

That’s like the third companys’ human safety officer that has basically quit to write poetry in the wilderness after staring into the abyss.

 

[Dire Bare]

His statement also makes me wary of any other endeavor he takes.
Because we now know he will use gen AI to build creative projects.

It certainly isn't going to help Dancey in the job search within the games industry . . . or maybe it will! Dancey isn't the only person in the industry (seemingly) eager to replace creative workers with AI. He should probably apply back with Hasbro . . .

Maybe he can start a new company, he can call it AI Slop Games!

 

[Artamo]

Is he wrong though? I do not know enough about those game or the extent of front-running AI abilities.

Well, he’s wrong about something. Reading both statements, I cannot believe that he thinks both statements are true about the game industry: (1. that AI is great for the gaming industry because humans seldom innovate in that industry and 2. That he thinks humans are uniquely creative.)

Maybe he’s thinks people are uniquely creative in some areas, but it seems clear that he doesn’t believe that holds for games. Should he be an executive in charge of a game company holding that belief?

 

[JML]

His statement also makes me wary of any other endeavor he takes.
Because we now know he will use gen AI to build creative projects.

I'd certainly be more skeptical of any endeavor he's a part of. I'm increasingly appreciative of companies putting out AI statements on things like their Kickstarters or other creative endeavors. The AI slop that floods the zone sucks, and statements like this from people like Dancy are indicative of a corporate desire to cut creatives out even more to juice their profits.

Sick of the people that would rather spend piles of cash on systems that are likely to fail and the only "positive" end result from "success" is taking jobs from creative people to send more cash back in the pockets of the corporate managers. Congrats, Mr. Dancy: you've gone from being seen as a hero of the people in the game industry with the OGL to another corporate stooge.

 

[Cergorach]

Hard to keep your staff motivated when you tell them that robots would do a better job.

He didn't say that, he said that AI (LLM) could do things as good as certain designers. And I think he's right.

But a game idea and/or initial design generally doesn't stop there, it goes through quite a few processes before it's released and many never go past those stages to release.

Heck, of those ideas he saw the AI (LLM) generate, how many were actually just as good? Of boardgame designers, how many ideas get pitched to boardgame publishers and get actually published? And just as with programmers and lawyers, you better have someone who knows what they're doing check the output, otherwise you're in for a hell of a problem!

Robots are something else btw. and in that particular case, robots do better work then the people they replaced. That's a hard fact, but very true. AI (LLM) isn't completely replacing humans, heck in most cases I do not trust LLMs without double checking everything and in quite a few cases that would mean more work then it would save.

Sidenote: On bgg these games score 7.2/7.2/7.4, from my perspective, these are pretty average games. Some people do really like certain average games (I really like Century: Spice Road for example, which scores a 7.3 on bgg).

AEG has made some very badly rated games the last 10 years, they've also milked their games pretty darned hard. Think of Thundestone Quest and Smash Up with oodles of expansions, Tiny Towns is currently at 5 expansions... And they also like to reuse their card crafting mechanic (see Mystic Vale). I wouldn't call AEG of the last 15-20 years the most... Creative in the first place.

I do have quite a few AEG games, but I already stopped backing them quite a while ago due to them keep expanding games (and me being a completionist), my Thunderstone Quest collection might be the size and weight of a person at this point... But these shenanigans do not motivate me to buy any future games from AEG. The Cardboard Herald I won't frequent either.

And boardgames is also a business, a high quality game does not necessarily sell well. While a low quality one might sell extremely well...

 

[Artamo]

He didn't say that, he said that AI (LLM) could do things as good as certain designers. And I think he's right.

“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.”

I dunno…that seemed to me to be exactly what he said. He wasn’t really parsing it to only “certain” designers. He was saying the gaming industry is not very innovative with very few truly original games. I think if there’s a greater nuance that he was trying to make he utterly failed at making it.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I think anyone that works in software/tech has been in multiple meetings where they were basically told they will be replaced in the not to distant future.

We just aren’t used to it, but threatening people that they can be/will be easily replaced by someone who will do it cheaper has been a mainstay of capitalism for quite a while. Don’t unionize or we’ll move the jobs, take the pay cut or we’ll just fire you and replace you with someone cheaper, or if you won’t work the over time we’ll find someone who will.

The tactic has just moved up the skill chain and high skilled employees are shocked because they didn’t think it would happen to them.

I think it was Goldman Sacks that was in the journal last week talking about how in 5 years all their financial analysts would be replaced by AI and it’s only going to take that long because they need to replace their internal software with software that allows AI agents to do the jobs. Basically telling thousands of high paid people they should prepare to be unemployed within 5 years.

Also from the journal:

“Anthropic safety researcher Mrinank Sharma said this week that he was leaving the company to explore a poetry degree, writing in a letter to colleagues that the “world is in peril” from AI, among other dangers. Last month, he published a paper that found that advanced AI tools can disempower users and distort their sense of reality. Anthropic says it is grateful for Sharon’s work”

That’s like the third companys’ human safety officer that has basically quit to write poetry in the wilderness after staring into the abyss.

Oh, I don't doubt it's here to stay. I think it's going to be similar to the dot com bust though. It's not ecologically sustainable, but more importantly (to it crashing or not) is AI companies are investing in each other, just passing the dollars around to artificially inflate it's value. That's not sustainable either. Similar to how people put millions into a dot com that had no actual product or value. Sooner or later it will crash. Then, also like dot com, it will come back, but a more stable. That's my prediction anway.

Regarding Goldman Sachs, a 5 year timeline seems worrisome. Right now, the AI we use is riddled with errors and mistakes. I spend more time reviewing AI features and stories for errors than I would creating it from scratch. And inevitably some things will get missed.

For example. just last week my team has a project implementing a middleware service called ECPA. It's a newer service. We have another service called ECPR. When AI took the intakes and started creating features, it decided on its own to change ECPA to ECPR. If that went through and our developers got them, they would not only not code the right service, they would break the existing one, which would be a disaster. Then AI also doesn't know all the scenarios in which a user or client would use the system, so tons of missed workflows to validate.

I was joking with my business analyst that I just hope AI stays sucky long enough for me to hit retirement. This big push by senior management is just going to end badly if they force it to replace everyone when it's this broken.

How does this relate to the topic? I think Ryan might be correct--in 5-10 years. If you leave it up to AI to design an TTRPG, you're gonna have something that makes Synnibar look polished. AI just can't handle context well or inferences of intuition when understanding mechanics.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'd certainly be more skeptical of any endeavor he's a part of. I'm increasingly appreciative of companies putting out AI statements on things like their Kickstarters or other creative endeavors. The AI slop that floods the zone sucks, and statements like this from people like Dancy are indicative of a corporate desire to cut creatives out even more to juice their profits.

Sick of the people that would rather spend piles of cash on systems that are likely to fail and the only "positive" end result from "success" is taking jobs from creative people to send more cash back in the pockets of the corporate managers. Congrats, Mr. Dancy: you've gone from being seen as a hero of the people in the game industry with the OGL to another corporate stooge.

Nothing about his recent comments takes away from his championing of the OGL, IMO the best thing that ever happened to the RPG community since the original release of D&D.

 

[HatWearingFool]

“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.”

I dunno…that seemed to me to be exactly what he said. He wasn’t really parsing it to only “certain” designers. He was saying the gaming industry is not very innovative with very few truly original games. I think if there’s a greater nuance that he was trying to make he utterly failed at making it.

True innovation doesn't come along very often, it's hard. Most industry's go a very long time without seeing true innovation that's just the way it is.