Ruin Explorer
Legend
Starfinder is notably unpopular. It's frequently discussed in Paizo communities, because people are disappointed about how extremely unpopular it is. So that has "worked so bad", actually. Fading Sun is RPG that almost no-one plays, so if that's the level of success you're looking for, great!Paizo's Starfinder is in its second edition, and it has published a lot of titles. Then it hasn't worked so bad. Is Fading Suns "space fantasy"?
Cool! It could fail completely miserably like every single other '80s Saturday morning cartoon-style RPG, videogame and even actual cartoons (like both revived He-Man cartoons - notably She-Ra took a very different tack which had more in common with genuinely modern cartoons, and featured young characters, and was pretty successful). But yeah that's an amazing recipe for failure. What's particularly sad is people always say they want that, if you ask them, then you provide, and they don't actually buy it/watch it.WotC could publish its space-fantasy RPG, something like a retro-vintage version of Star Frontiers but add some mystical elements, something style 80's Saturday morning cartoon.
Actually, sci-fi shooters flop hard with some regularity, and it's usually a good way to do worse than "tactical gear fetish" shooters like Call of Duty. Sega lost well over $100m on a sci-fi shooter recently, Hyenas, and the list of failed sci-fi shooters is lengthy - a few easy examples: Lawbreakers, Battleborn, Titanfall 2, Shadowrun (2007), Agents of Mayhem (also fits under "80s cartoon"), Battlefield 2142, Battlefield 2042 (which has caused EA to revise their thinking about the entire Battlefield franchise), Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (one of the few CoDs that genuinely underperformed, maybe the only recent one), Evolve, Anthem, The Anacrusis, Disintegration, Bleeding Edge, Crucible, Wolfenstein: The New Order (the only genuinely sci-fi one, the rest being dieselpunk), Hyperscape (which Ubisoft lost crazy money on).Sci-fi has worked very well in the videogame industry, specially shooter subgenre.
That's a tiny fraction of the the total.
Hell if you just look at any "list of failed AAA games", it'll be littered with sci-fi shooters, including
There are exceptions - you can certainly do okay with sci-fi, but you're taking a much, much bigger risk than you are with tactical fetish stuff, which has more of a guaranteed audience.
This isn't the 1990s, when conspiracy theories were just harmless fun, dude.I hope be not off-topic but we should remember the potential influence of the UFO and conspirancy-theories "mythology". Somes of these theories could be used by players for their homebred settings (and this doesn't mean those believed to be true).
Today we have countless millions of people devoted to all sorts of bizarre conspiracy theories as if they were reality, even in developed countries. It's very likely such an RPG would end up as modern fantasy, not SF (as Dark*Matter did - it was also extremely odd in the conspiracies it chose, but that's a whole separate discussion which there are entire websites devoted to).
* = Games with the asterisk were also extremely good games, so it was particularly shocking they failed,
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