Comparing top 10 games on Roll20 vs Fantasy Grounds

tl;dr: D&D 5e dominates both; Fantasy Grounds likes Pathfinder, Roll20 likes Call of Cthulu.

Fantasy Grounds released its player numbers and I wanted to put the top 10 games side by side to compare. This it done by taking the top 10 games on Roll20 and then setting seeing how all the players who played those games were split out, then taking those same games for Fantasy Grounds.

Unsurprisingly, D&D 5e is the Kaiju in the room on both sites; ~ 3 in every 4 games are D&D 5e. We more or less knew this. What is interesting is the split on the last quarter.

Here a distinct difference can be seen - the number 2 game system on both sites is different. On Roll20 Call of Cthulu (CoC) is the second by a large margin while on Fantasy Grounds it places 7th. The second place spot on Fantasy Grounds is comfortably occupied by Pathfinder, currently shared between 1e and 2e. PF 1e has a decent showing on Roll20 but PF 2e is much more popular on Fantasy Grounds

Digging a little into the rest of the tail - Fantasy Grounds also has a strong showing for Starfinder and Savage Worlds - Starfinder adding to a strong link to works from Paizo. The other significant difference is the low placing of any Warhammer properties on Fantasy Grounds - no WHFRP or any of the 40K RPGs place within the top 10 - combined with the weaker showing for Star Wars, perhaps sci-fi fans on Fantasy Grounds have been swept up by Star Finder?

Overall two interesting things jump out for me:
1) the strong differences between the 2-9 top 10 games indicate quite different community preferences. I have no information why - a hypothesis could be that these VTTs have very different levels of support for the different systems, suggesting that good VTT integration can pull players one way or another
2) D&D 5e is the sun around which all orbits and that suggests anything needs to be 'good enough' in 5e to be in the running. I suspect that the plethora of publishers our there mean that different people may be supporting different VTTs - e.g. Fantasy Grounds gets good stuff from Pelgrane, Roll20 gets good stuff from Kobold Press (to pick two names from the ether) but both will appear in the stats as '5e'.

This also backs up decisions for various publishers to push their product as 5e compatible - see the recent Iron Kingdoms kickstarter.

Sources

Fantasy Ground 4Q 2020 report.

Roll20 - Orr report for 4Q 2020.