Which SciFi ttrpg has the largest player base?

[Anonymouswizard]

I think part of the issue, at least as I see it, is that sci-fi games tend to rely more heavily on a particular setting or "brand" as central to their appeal: you're not playing a sci-fi game, you're playing a Star Wars game, or a Warhammer 40K game, or a Traveller game. You're coming as much for the franchise as you are for the roleplay experience.

Even more ostensibly generic games like Scum and Villainy not tied to a specific property have some specific worldbuilding that informs what stories it's trying to tell and what characters the players are incentivized to play. Beyond that, the only other sci-fi games I've encountered are space-themed hacks of generic game systems like FATE or Savage Worlds, often attempts to recreate a sci-fi property that doesn't have its own tabletop spinoff, like Mass Effect or something, and then of course there's the inevitable attempt to twist and cram a homebrew sci-fi setting into D&D's ruleset.

It's a lot easier for a game to speak in generalities with a fantasy setting for an RPG, but from my observation people's expectations are higher for sci-fi. Like, if games were ice cream, fantasy is vanilla, but in scifi's case there's things like rocky road and neapolitan and there's even mint chocolate chip and cookies and cream but no one orders just plain chocolate, if that analogy makes sense.

Honestly, I don't think that it's that fantasy RPGs are actually more generic, it's just that people assume they are. It's also a bit weird that we use 'fantasy RPG' and actually mean 'Heroic Fantasy RPG' most of the time, but we don't really tend to assume a specific genre of science fiction RPG, lumping Space Opera, Cyberpunk, and even post-apocalyptic RPGs into the group.

In theory a generic fantasy game would handle European Heroic Fantasy, Dark Mythological Fantasy, and High Wuxia all under the same ruleset. I can't actually think of anything that does, at least without really getting on the sourcebook treadmill. In fact I own more fantasy RPGs than science fiction RPGs, and while they tend to be less honest about their assumed setting (for Heroic Medieval Europe ones at least) it's still there. The way you set up your magic system matters as much as the way you set up star travel. There's a reason the 'D&D in Middle-Earth' book suggests that you shouldn't use the core classes that didn't get reprinted.

That's why Osprey Games has been able to release four fantasy RPGs (with a fifth on the way) and one science fiction RPG in the last two years. The SF one, those Dark Places, is exactly as you described for SF RPGs, while the explicit setting is limited to two pages and what we can extrapolated from it's talk of ships and bases, it has consistent theming that's one part Alien, one part Western, and arguably one part Revelation Space. But the exact same thing can be applied to the fantasy games, whether that's Romance of the Perilous Land's mix of British folklore with some elements of D&D, Paleomythic and it's stone age Conanism, Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades and it's more gritty take on Wuxia, or Jackals and it's bronze age war setting. And I'm being somewhat unfair to all the fantasy RPGs, as it's hard to get every element in a single phrase.