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.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Figuring how to work healthcare isn't a job for swords...

I don't know, I might require some empirical evidence to validate that claim.

 

[Cergorach]

I feel like this take doesn't actually understand how the market works, particularly not how it worked when most people obtained RPGs from FLGSes, not via Kickstarter, PDFs, and Amazon.

No I understand, I ran a webstore from 2000-2007. My primary focus was D&D, quite a bit of D20 I could get and to a lesser extend other RPGs (in the Netherlands, Europe).

Even before the OGL was published in October 2000, things were pretty dire in the TTRPG landscape. TSR went bankrupt, bought by WotC, which in turn was bought by Hasbro. Games Workshop had long ago pulled out of the TTRPG market. FASA was already winding down and would close asap (a few products in 2000). White Wolf was still active with their WoD, and was very active on the D20 side. Target Games went belly up in 1999, WEG went bankrupt in 1998, GDW went bankrupt in 1996, ICE went bankrupt in 2000. Dream Pod 9 already went into decline in 1999 (commercial failure of the HG2 computer game), but around here that already happened a lot sooner as I was able to buy most of HG at dump discounts because it didn't sell.

And that's not even mentioning the huge amount of TTRPG distributors that went bankrupt in the second half of the 90s.

That's not even talking about the (not so) FLGS going bankrupt at the same time. Those that were successful and stayed in business went for the primarily popular publishers, with only tiny selections of very niche TTRPG products. Those that did go for less known games and TTRPGs eventually went belly up, in most cases at the end of the 90s. The store where I picked up oodles of cheap Heavy Gear was such a store.

Not all stores are the same of course, when I went to the Orc's Nest (UK) in 94' the size and variety of options was HUGE, as was the depth. I don't know how that store looked 5 years later or today, but extremely different from most game stores in the Netherlands. I do remember that getting anything outside of what sold well at the time was extremely difficult, often time consuming and very expensive (and with less margin for the store owner).

But as you already said, outside of mainstream stuff, it was extremely difficult to get, had to import stuff myself, extremely slow and expensive. I even had to set up foreign business banking accounts to even consider getting such stuff. And even then the demand was extremely low, if you were looking to make a living on that, not worth it in retrospect.

And as you said, the Internet wasn't where it is now, the big PDF sellers didn't even exist yet (RPGNow 2001, DTRPG 2004). Amazon already existed, but wasn't selling much RPG stuff yet, and if it was, it was mostly mainstream publishers. I mostly ordered from amazon.co.uk at the time, which required a credit card, which most people at the time in western Europe didn't have (hence the reason I started my webshop). So the only way new publishers could get into selling stuff at that time was via traditional distribution channels, which by that time were a LOT more risk averse due to the many bankruptcies in that branch.

With RPGNow (PDF sales) their bestsellers were mostly D20 titles, they even tried to reach out to other publishers but they didn't want to enter the PDF market due to concerns of piracy or dangers to their print sales. Never realizing that most of the rest of the world couldn't get their print products...

So please tell me which new publishers started in 2000 before WotC released the OGL in October 2000?

...leading to a gazillion more PHB sales!", and I'll assume he meant it. That this is not how it has turned out is a great boon.

It did lead to a whole lot of PHB sales. But it also lead to a bunch of other consequences he didn't mention at the time, to us or the WotC/Hasbro management. OGL titles like SpyCraft, Stargate, WarCraft, EverQuest, Babylon 5, Armageddon 2089, etc. And eventually to Pathfinder. All things that didn't require a PHB...

What some people seem to forget is that Ryan Dancy was already part of AEG before WotC bought TSR. Ryan Dancey was part of the team that made the acquisition possible by WotC, they brought the deal to WotC (which also bought Five Rings Publishing). AEG did very well with D20/OGL products during it's peak... He went back there a decaded ago (when they were already out of the RPG business). He worked for the computer game arm of Paizo, on the Pathfinder MMO, Pathfinder which wouldn't exist in that form without the OGL... Ryan Dancey made money on the TSR sale to WotC, from the FRP sale, worked for WotC, made his future bed with the OGL, and after being fired worked almost a quarter of a century in the gaming bed he made.

Let's say Ryan Dancey was tired after a decade of working at AEG, and was interested in working in an AI focused company instead... What better way to gain noteriety to be hired by an AI focused company? I also wonder is he was fired 'for cause' at AEG or if he left with a nice severance package, which you don't get if you quit...

Europeans, and others who live in areas with dense language heterogeneity, get their noses about US monolingualism, as if their tendency toward multilingualism is due to moral superiority rather than convenience.

No! Not convenience, necessity. The US is just lucky they inherited English from the British. If instead they inherited Dutch as their main language, the default western language might still be English due to the British...

As for Spanish in the US, I suspect that's more due to more 'recent' imigrants in the southern part of the US and their US born children learning the language from their parents then anything else. As there is also no major movement to learning the French of their northern neighbors...

We get quite a few US tourists here that wonder (loudly) why people of European country xyz don't speak American or accept dollars. How many tourists from European based countries would ever dare say that? We've also got quite a few US immigrants (they like to call themselves expats), some try to learn the language (to much amusement from the local population), some don't.

It isn't about 'moral superiority', it's about arrogance. The arrogance of thinking that learning another language isn't a necessity when dealing with other countries and people of other countries.

 

[Artamo]

Let's say Ryan Dancey was tired after a decade of working at AEG, and was interested in working in an AI focused company instead... What better way to gain noteriety to be hired by an AI focused company? I also wonder is he was fired 'for cause' at AEG or if he left with a nice severance package, which you don't get if you quit...

That’s a heck of a risk. I’m sure there’s lots of CEOs in the market for COOs who make publicly damaging remarks about their company without consulting management prior to making them

 

[FrogReaver]

If the AI hype is true, it should be possible and pretty much inevitable.

On the other hand:
Is there an AI that can take the rules of a game and play it in a viable way?
Can the AI produce from the rules a description of the underlying mechanics?
Can the AI produce permutations of these mechanics to produce game that is a variation of the original but still an enjoyable game?
Can the AI repeat this analysis over a number of games and combine mechanics to produce an interesting and viable game?
Can the AI understand the concept of fun?

Considering how many games flop, can humans understand the concept of fun?