With rampant speculation across the internet about lawsuits, seeing fewer people at local stores, and product being difficult to obtain, you might wonder whether Disney Lorcana is in any danger of dying. As a member of the game industry for the last decade, I'm going to take an educated guess: it isn't. I'll ignore the stance that Disney is too big to fail because it might be the opposite. Disney may have incredibly high sales expectations for publisher Ravensburger, which means there are sales goals and royalties that Disney expects to see. While I don't have that information, I would venture to guess it's an incredibly healthy business relationship. Instead, I'd like to posit more realistic factors in determining whether the game is dying.

In the mid-90s to the early 00s, there was a slew of new collectible card games that hit the market following the success of Magic: The Gathering and the repeat success that Wizards of the Coast (and later The Pokemon Company) brought the Pokemon TCG and Upper Deck (and later Konami) brought Yu-Gi-Oh!. These games are all still alive and thriving today. You can see the unprecedented success of the Magic brand right here on CoolStuffInc. However, despite the longevity and success of those games, you can see the failure of hundreds of other games in the throes of third-party vendors that show up at conventions. Most of those publishers popped up out of nowhere and found popular licenses, including several defunct Star Wars card games and a Lord of the Rings card game from Decipher, Inc. that was successful until it ran out of stills from Peter Jackson's trilogy and couldn't create enough good content.

Following that swell in the market, the bubble burst. Publishers died off left and right, and for about twenty years the market slowed back down. We saw the rise and fall (and rise and fall (and rise and fall)) of the Universal Fighting System published by Sabertooth Games (then Fantasy Flight Games (then Jasco Games (then UVS games))) which is still going strong with licenses like Godzilla, Critical Role, and My Hero Academia. We also saw the rise and fall of Force of Will, which lots of people gambled on being successful. That largely remained the same until the last few years.

Bandai never stopped betting on some of their heavy-hitting properties, which are now seeing longer term success with a stable of games mostly designed by Ryan Miller. Of course, it would be remiss not to mention the experiment Fantasy Flight Games attempted in the 2010s with their brand of Living Card Games. Packs were static instead of random, came out monthly, but still had an organized play scene with players building their own unique decks. The most successful of which is probably Android: Netrunner. The LCG model still exists today, though only with two cooperative games: Marvel Champions and Call of Cthulhu.

In the last few years, other games have come out, been revived, and exist with healthy player bases. Of course, the one that continues to grow despite releasing just before a global pandemic is Flesh and Blood. The newest iteration of UFS, rebranded as UniVersus launched recently and continues to grow with new worlds, mechanics, and a brand-new team.

Miller went on to work with Ravensburger to create Disney Lorcana, the game we know and love today. Ravensburger is a well-established publisher of board games, puzzles, books, and many other products. This means Lorcana has a healthy foundation and a company with decades of experience behind it. Ravensburger has partnered with Disney on a number of board games and puzzles in the past, and I would hard pressed to speculate that partnership is anything but stellar, with both parties carefully watching spending and revenue. After all, these are both massive companies with accounting departments, not a handful of people with a hope and a dream.

Members of the games industry have more experience with card games now than they did in the last twenty-five years since the genre was born. There are obviously telltale signs that we can use to infer the health of a game in a vacuum. You might notice fewer people showing up at your local game store for weekly meets, or you might see a store getting fewer products or even more product than they used to, leading you to speculate. But the truth is so much more complex than a single anecdote. Lorcana is a complex entity made by and for gamers and collectors. Collectors who might have disappeared from your Facebook groups can now regularly find product instead of the gold rush we found ourselves in with The First Chapter. Does that mean the game is dying? Are people buying less product? Probably not. On the contrary, it means that product is now flowing in a healthy state through Ravensburger and all their distribution partners into the hands of local game stores. It's only been a year since the game's launch, which would've given Ravensburger's production and sales departments the information they need to correctly project how much to print for each set. What we're seeing right now, in real-time, is the course correction from the first set to maintain the health of sales.

Some speculators are also noting a decline in activity on Facebook groups or people meeting at their local game stores. I'm here to tell you that's okay! It's perfectly normal. People finding other hobbies, spending time with their families, etc. doesn't mean they're not playing the game anymore. It might mean they found a closer game store, their work schedule might've changed, etc. But another thing to consider here is any piece of media (movies, games, etc.) has a hype level well above normal at the beginning of its life cycle. Most game companies anticipate this and expect a certain amount of drop-off after the initial impact of launch. This is likely why we couldn't find product in the first few months, and why printing the same amount as the total of The First Chapter would've led to market saturation. Instead, each set is likely a small step down until finding the perfect amount. But it won't always be a step down. Like Magic: The Gathering, they'll find a pattern with sets that players resonate with and sets that aren't as enticing to gamers, and once Ravensburger establishes a healthy parameter, it will fluctuate between them.

Ravensburger is even experimenting with different product types already, like the Illumineer's Quest, to attract different types of gamers. This took Wizards of the Coast several years to figure out. On top of all that, the Lorcana tournament circuit is just now starting its engine to see tournament players plant seeds for budding careers in the same way that gamers did with Magic's ProTour back in the day. There's plenty of room for Lorcana to grow, and I have no doubt that it's here to stay.