Ryan Dancey is Destroying Gaming

Ryan Dancey has a long history of doom and glooming the RPG industry (This is the only one I could find as it seems he’s deleted his blog). It’s always exciting when he does this because every forum on the internet that cares about RPGs denies whatever he says. I’m not against what they’re saying, but they have one fundamental problem: their evidence is anecdotal. Ryan Dancey is connected enough in the industry to have hard numbers and facts to back up his suppositions. Of course, since all of this information is confidential, he never shares any of it. He just makes broad statements about the industry based on his insider’s perspective. This is really annoying, as it’s impossible to refute what he says because he hides his sources.

But that’s not really what this is about. My real point is that all the doom and gloom that Ryan Dancey foresees for the RPG industry is because of things that Ryan Dancey has done.

Let’s start when he was with the Five Rings Publishing Group and instigated Rolling Thunder. Rolling Thunder was an idea to remove rarity from CCGs and introduce scarcity instead. As you can read here, it failed pretty spectacularly and probably indirectly led to the destruction of some potential CCGs (Rage, Doomtown, and Dune seem like their popularity wasn’t enough to get over that hump).

Fast forward to the 3rd edition of D&D and Ryan Dancey creates the OGL. In the short term, this seemed like a great move. Stores were full of d20 products that everyone was buying. Until everyone stopped buying them and the D20 bust happened. Ryan defends the OGL here from “an insider perspective and from the hobbyist perspective.” While I’m willing to buy his (again, secret) insider perspective, he fails to actually talk about it from a hobbyist perspective.

Later, we have Ryan Dancey joining GAMA in order to revitalize the industry and its trade organization. Until he resigned for hacking into their email accounts. So, not only is he full of great ideas for the industry, but he’s full of integrity as well.

The latest affront from Dancey was an interview at Gamasutra. As the head of CCP Marketing, he’s gone ahead and declared that White Wolf is just “…an imprint…[a] legacy business.” While it’s true that White Wolf hasn’t come out with any physical products in quite awhile, to pronounce their death like that, well, it honestly just sounds like Dancey’s talking. He’s been declaring the death of the industry for so long, it’s bound to come true…especially when he’s behind it.