What are the popular sci-fi games?

Seen asked on the Giants in the Playground forums with some debate over how reliable VTT numbers could be since it won't capture the old guard who shun the online. My hypothesis is that this is a smaller slice than people think but let us see what we can find out.

Starting with our contemporary VTTs Roll20 & Fantasy Grounds - as discussed in a recent post - we have 40K, Starfinder and Star Wars placing as our top 3 sci-fi games at present - displayed without 5e so the scales are not tiny.

Comparing this to the ICV2 numbers that show what retail sales buzz is - here we have placement in top 5 most popular over 50 reports since 2004 - Star wars and Starfinder with a dash of Alien as the new new thing. This was lumped by system (e.g. Star Wars counts together whether by FFG or WotC).

Game	Appearances
Dungeons & Dragons	49
Pathfinder	31
World of Darkness	23
Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader	20
Star Wars	20
Shadowrun	17
Fantasy/Dragon Age	11
WHFRP	11
Exalted	8
Mutants & Masterminds	7
Starfinder	5
Iron Kingdoms	5
Fate Core System	5
Mongoose	4
Green Ronin**	3
GURPS	3
Scion	3
Alien	2
Cyberpunk	2
Mutants and Masterminds, inc. DC	2
Numenera	2
Song of Ice and Fire	2
Adventures in Middle Earth	1
Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition	1
Genesys (FFG)	1
Legend of the Five Rings (FFG)	1
Star Trek Adventures	1
Battlestar Galactica	1
BESM	1
Dresden Files	1
Dungeon Crawl Classics	1
Marvel Heroic Roleplaying	1
The One Ring	1

This does not cover us back pre-millenium - systems like Robotech, Rifts, Mechwarrior which I certainly remember from ads in Dragon Magazine - but it gives us a sense of what has been on shelves over the past decade and a half.

Looking at the long haul of Roll20 - sci-fi used to have a bigger share with ~7% of users playing Star Wars or 40k systems but all these, including Starfinder place at ~3% now. However as the community of players has grown 8-fold, the actual numbers of players this implies has grown. These communities are growing, just more slowly than the Roll20 population (effectively driven by D&D 5e).

Trying to determine if there is a latent interest in sci-fi RPGs out there that we are just not seeing we can compare to polls of players or write-ups by DMs. Can we see a broadly similar pattern of people liking their swords more than their laser-pistols?

From the replica of the 1985 Dragon Magazine survey done by Random Wizards in 2013-2017 where people get an open question to name their favourite genre we see sci-fi coming in second to fantasy after a significant step down.

Looking at a survey conducted by Radiation Burn Games of their players, mostly in the UK, asking what are their favourite genres we find hard sci-fi and space fantasy placing behind a bunch of different genres like steampunk and horror.

Going back to the WotC 2000 survey where they asked in a broad survey of households what games had played in the past month there was a decent showing of sci-fi games of the era - Star Wars, Star Trek, Palladium (assume Rifts, not Fantasy) and Alternity. Dark Heresy would not come out until 2008, nor Starfinder until 2017.

Taken all together, they surveys suggest an appetite for sci-fi ~15-20% the size of that for fantasy. This is roughly coherent with the ICV2 numbers - sci-fi is placing in the top-5 rankings 40% of the time. It suggests the Roll20 numbers are indeed low, that there is more than ~ 5% of players interested in sci-fi, and raises the question of where they are? Have fantasy gamers embraced VTTs and online tools while sci-fi gamers have stuck to analogue gaming? That would seem very counter-intuitive to me. Is it that support for sci-fi systems is not as good as for fantasy games? That I could believe more readily and it would suggest an unmet appetite for more sci-fi gaming content.

Sources: A Survey For TTRPG Players by Radiation Burn Games.

Random Wizards replica of Dragon Magazine 1985 survey.

Enworld partial collection of ICV2 surveys.

Fantasy Ground 4Q 2020 report.

Roll20 - Orr report for 4Q 2020.

Wizards of the Coast 1999 market survey report.