More than a few times, and bordering on a lot, I’ve been told by more experienced folk in the gaming business that sci-fi games simply don’t sell. Sci-fi RPGs, be they Alternity or Trinity, fail to find the kind of audiences that fantasy RPGs do, be they D&D or Vampire. For sci-fi elements to sell, they have to be mixed with fantasy, to create things like Warhammer 40k. (Or, as one retailer I knew put it, you have to trick people into buying sci-fi games.) I’ve pitched numerous sci-fi RPGs, card games, and board games only to be rebuffed, time and again, by this notion. And I have to assume that it’s accurate, because it’s been told to me by several learned people, and because I’ve never really been able to challenge the lesson.
What do you think?
Why don’t sci-fi games sell like fantasy games do?
Right off the bat, I dunno about card and boardgames. Those seem just fine as Sci Fi to me. But RPGS….
I think the problem is that we have no shared shorthand the way we do for Fantasy, which is to say, we have no Tolkein. Yes, Howard and other authors were incredibly influential for tone and other elements, but Tolkein created the “default” fantasy elements, allowing us to drop in some elves, dwarves and wizards and have a rough idea of what’s going on, even if we will eventually be shown why “our elves are different”.
Sci Fi has no such shorthand, or rather, has several dueling shorthands that won’t ever resolve themselves. In large part, we have Star Wars and Star Trek, both with their readily identifiable elements and both with things that make them painfully hard to generalize (Jedi more than the Federation, but that’s just a matter of degree). Combine that with all the other fragmentations and possibilities, and if you say to me that a setting has spaceships, lasers and robots, you have more or less told me NOTHING. I cannot rest on assumptions, and thus need it all explained to me every time.
And I don’t see that changing. Sci Fi, as a genre, is all _about_ explaining things. It rests on a foundation of extrapolation and projection. A Science Fiction setting rests on a handful of big principles, with extrapolation form that. A fantasy setting rests on a handful of small exceptions and sometimes extrapolations from that. (That is to say, the difference between two fantasy settings is usually some fiddly bit about how wizards work. The difference between to Sci-Fi settings tend to run bone deep).
That said, if you’re willing to spend a metric fuckton on art, I suspect you could overcome this. Whereas there’s a lot of overlap in Fantasy imagery, Sci-Fi imagery is more diverse and, in many ways, even more essential to the setting. Art alone won’t do it, but it’s the foot in the door – if you can follow it with something compelling, you may have a winner. Warhammer’s done this, and to some extent so have Blizzard.
That said, I think it’s getting easier. Sci fi tropes are getting more common, and something like Mass Effect is very easy to grasp because it sticks pretty strongly within the bounds. It’s still not as instantly recognizable as the elves and dwarves of Dragon Age, but it’s a great example of a direction that might well work.
-Rob D.
Sci-fi seems, to me at least, to be a more fragmented market, with many factions, seemingly at war with one another. One doesn’t need to spend long on message boards to see the flame wars between Babylon 5, Firefly, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc fans. I’m not saying this doesn’t happen in the fantasy world as well, just that it seems much less pronounced.
Also, for whatever reason, generic Fantasy seems to be easier for people to swallow. Perhaps because fantasy settings have more in common with one another, the “Tolkien base” if you will.
I would be interested to find the sales numbers for licensed sci-fi games vs non licensed, and compare that with licensed vs non-licensed fantasy games.
This is not backed up by anything resembling evidence, but I wonder if it’s more that spaceships don’t sell.
SF purists might argue with me, but I’d say that the “big tent” definition of science fiction includes things like d20 Modern (past the bleeding edge tech, even if you only count the healing available) even Delta Green as long as you don’t say that evil beasties turns the whole thing into fantasy.
If science fiction has to equal space/aliens/rivets that’s a pretty small niche to try to compare against a fantasy category that encompasses “anything that has magic in it.”
I concur with what Rob was saying, regarding a lack of easy shorthand when it comes to SF. That may be due to market fragmentation like Margaret or Nerdgasm are referring to, but I think it’s also by the very nature of science fiction. SF is a genre built not just on imagination but on explanation of that imagination–rules and systems, sometimes all the way down to the hard science underneath it all.
That’s not to say that there isn’t systematized fantasy (particularly when it comes to magic systems) or that science fiction doesn’t have more than its share of hand-waving (ala Star Trek technobabble or Star Wars’ midichlorians.) But I think consumers of a science fiction setting expect that if they dive into the depths there will be systemic explanations behind the world and events around them, while in a fantasy setting they’re happy to just ride the surface, buoyed by that shared shorthand of elves and dwarves or liberal use of the word ‘magic’.
So I suspect part of the reason SF games don’t succeed as readily is because fewer GMs are willing to put in the brain cycles to fully develop or rationalize their adventures, or aren’t prepared to have an encyclopedic knowledge of setting material, or can’t keep up on the fly with requests from players for ever more information that hangs on a rational structure when in a fantasy game they might have the simple outs of magic or the whims of the gods.
That’s why, I think, there are few successful hard SF game settings. The more space opera the setting, the more chance it has at success because players are willing to accept tropes and broad explanations from the GM without digging further.
There are numerous reasons that Science Fiction has a smaller audience.
1. Suspension of Disbelief is more difficult. Fantasy throws out the rules so far that any oddity can be summed up as magic and readily accepted. Whereas, in Science Fiction, readers or players expect things to make a sort of logical sense.
2. Authority to Act. In a fantasy game, players feel free to do what they want. It’s okay to travel to far lands and get into fight. But Sci-Fi is too close to reality for that. Players feel constrained by societal laws.
3. Sci-Fi is less fantastical. The truth is, we live in a high tech world as it is. Very little in Sci-Fi requires a big stretch of the imagination. A spaceship is like any other vessel, it just goes through space, which you can’t really do anything with. Thus the idea that you need fantastical elements to make Sci-Fi work. You have to break out of the world that people readily understand if you want that “magical” feeling that draws a lot of people in.
4. Most Sci-Fi games don’t clearly express what the players do. You can have all the aliens and spaceships you want, but that doesn’t make a game, only a setting. Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020 are exceptions to this, and both are rather successful. You’re a professional criminal. That’s simple to grasp. Fantasy is like this. You know you’re some sort of hero, off to save the world from terrible monsters. That’s what every fantasy story is.
5. And lastly, a smaller audience. Fantasy does better every every medium, whether books or movies. People, when consuming fantasy, can often shut their brains off and just enjoy a story. Most Science Fiction doesn’t allow for that, and only a handful of us are nerdy enough to spend our leisure time doing mental gymnastics. So, there’s simply a larger pool of people for fantasy games to draw from.
I think it’s very, very simple –
The most popular pen and paper RPG is D&D, which, of course, draws from Tolkein. Therefore concepts that draw from this tend to attract people into gaming in the first place. It’s the game with the most influence and the most publicity.
Personally, I find this a huge disservice, as, like Sci-Fi, there should be many fantasy worlds to explore. It strikes me as odd that fantasy appears to have more hard and fast rules than sci-fi. An orc is universal.
Sci-fi, on the other hand, has a lot of diversity, and cross-genre. Sci-fi is, after all, a reimagining of mythology in a more modern, science-based form. The gods and their worlds have been replaced with planets. Mythological races have been replaced with the alien.
I would say it’s a factor of the initial draw to RPG’s being D&D, and that having the most exposure. From there, the leap to sci-fi is a bit more difficult.
Now, here’s the thing, both genres share the Hero’s Journey that most RPG’s are based on in the first place.
I’ve had this conversation rather a lot, and these are the same points that it usually tends to come down to. To be clear, though, I’m not just talking about RPGs, which have particular hurdles in the shared-information space to overcome, but sci-fi games of all ilks.
“Most Sci-Fi games don’t clearly express what the players do.”
This, I think, is a much underestimated problem in sci-fi RPGs, in which the setting is thought to be the draw and the core of the game, in place of What the Player Characters Do. This isn’t a uniquely sci-fi problem, of course, except for the fact that science fiction, as a genre, presumes less about default occupations than fantasy or even horror do. For some reason, though, sci-fi RPGs often focus on being “sci-fi RPGs” instead of specific task-oriented RPGs, like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 are. (I won’t call Shadowrun a straight-up sci-fi game, per se, but you see the point.)
Sci-fi, then, is maybe more of a mode, not a proper genre. And that’s fine. You can have crime sci-fi games (Cyberpunk and Shadowrun, both, to their degrees) but also military games (Mechwarrior) and exploratory (Star Trek), etc., all of them sci-fi yet all in slightly different genres. Or something.
I’m rambling.
I’m not sure if the argument that ‘sci-fi games in general don’t sell’ applies to computer games. You’ve got games like Halo and Starcraft (hell, the whole FPS genre is dominated by science fiction guys in power armour with guns).
Right on, Gareth. And sci-fi movies have traditionally performed better than fantasy movies. (Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter sort of buck the trend, but most attempts to recreate LotR’s success at the cinema have not succeeded.) Well, for certain values of “fantasy.” (I’m thinking especially of swords-and-sorcery.)
But, yeah, my question is geared toward the hobby-game market foremost, where fantasy and historical products outsell sci-fi products.
To be fair, it also isn’t as if I’m utterly boggled by this question — I just think it’s ripe for discussion. 🙂
These points have been made, but I want to call specific attention to two of them:
(1) Sci-fi games are often guilty of selling the setting instead of selling a game. And by game I mean “thing that the PCs do”. Trinity is often cited as a counter-example, but Trinity blew it: The initial release did have a relatively tight focus… but it also failed to provide the necessary information in the core rulebook to actually run a campaign within that focus. They fell prey to supplement-itis and it bit them in the ass.
(2) People are often bamboozled by the “generic fantasy” of D&D and try to design the complementary “generic sci-fi” game. But D&D is only “generic fantasy” insofar as it played a major role in defining what the “generic fantasy” genre is.
Nor has D&D ever really supported generic play within its setting. At its absolute broadest point it supported (a) hardcore adventurers and (b) fantasy rulers. And (b) disappeared pretty quick from the core game.
So people are either shooting for “generic genre” or they’re trying to sell the setting. Neither has ever sold well as an RPG, no matter what the genre has been.
Consider also the example of Traveller: When it first started out it was a “generic” sci-fi game in much the same fashion that D&D was a “generic” fantasy game. (IOW, it made some essentially arbitrary decisions about what elements of sci-fi to include in order to create its own unique blend of the genre and then provided a default assumption regarding the style of play.) And it was incredibly popular.
But as Traveller developed as a product line, it became more and more interested in “selling the setting” of the Imperium… and its popularity steadily waned.
Fact: Eclipse Phase has sold incredibly well.
Supposition: Despite being ground in hard science, Eclipse Phase is so very transhuman as to invoke Clarke’s law for many gamers, e.g. it might as well be considered to have “fantastic” elements.
It’s also true that psionics (though very grounded in the game’s setting) were allowed for, a classic of “soft” sci-fi.
Thank you for bringing up Eclipse Phase, TS. It’s the game that makes me wonder: Is it that sci-fi games don’t sell… or that the attempts at sci-fi games done to date haven’t sold?
Does 40k sell because of its fantasy elements, or do we categorize it as something other than SF because it sells? Is it the exception that proves the rule, or the exception that implies the rule is wrong?
That Eclipse Phase has sold suggests to me that there has been an untapped niche for SF in RPGs–and itch that EP scratches. (It of course doesn’t hurt that EP is gorgeous and, as you say, so incredible in its tech as to allow for fantastical play.)
I won’t deny that SF may be a higher hurdle to jump, but I continue to believe that SF products of a certain quality should be able to sell.
I have a few SF games in the hopper that I keep thinking I’ll try to do as indies one day (when the sky opens up and supplies me with extra hours in the day, perhaps). So perhaps I’ll put my money where my mouth is then.
I think the problem is with the question you ask: Sci-Fi doesn’t sell? What do you consist “sell” means? The numbers have to be equal to D&D? Do Sci-Fi games make a profit? Do they sell through their print run? The question you ask is flawed.
I see this same argument with RPG adventures not selling, but Goodman Games and Paizo built their business models off of selling adventures. So like I said, I think the question you ask itself is flawed.
Louis, it’s an inherent problem with the question, sure. But it’s also an inherent problem with the information I’ve been given: sci-fi games don’t sell. (Or, put another way, “people don’t want sci-fi games.”)
Would they sell just fine if we lowered the costs of design and production so that 1,000 copies was enough to make us a decent profit? Or does a sci-fi game need visuals to sell, which drive up the cost of production? Does an SF RPG need to compete with D&D to be “successful?” Does it need to be a flagship for the company? These are all embedded in the question.
(These discussions don’t seem to be complete until a reader challenges the question itself. Fair enough.)
Of course, I can’t be much more specific because the sales data I could give you (and it isn’t much) for SF games isn’t mine to give away. I simply get met, from informed and experienced game publishers, by that line: sci-fi doesn’t sell.
Does your resistance to the question mean that you think this old industry chestnut is wrong?
I think it’s wrong insofar as I don’t think it’s a universal truth, but I haven’t made or lost money on the question, so my position is less informed than others.
First of all, I don’t consider myself a fan of sci-fi gaming. Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek (with TNG being my favorite Trek incarnation), as well as the Alien movies and several other quality sci-fi works. I have been invited to play Star Wars rpg’s more times than I can count (both d6 & d20 versions) and have tried to play a number of video games that are in the sci-fi genre. Most of my friends don’t understand my blatant refusal to play sci-fi games, and frankly I haven’t always been so successful trying to figure it out either. But the end result of all of it is that I have been questioning this preference for the past year or so and trying to figure out what it is that makes me shy away from these games.
I agree with the above points that have already been made about the fragmentation of the genre and the lack of a standard, but what I think it is, for me at least, is scope.
The sci-fi games that I have liked the best are limited in scope. Two of my favorite video games in the genre are Fallout 3 and Dead Space. The sci-fi rpg I’ve gotten the most enjoyment out of is Gamma World.
What do these have in common? They are set mostly in confined locations. Dead Space is set primarily on the Ishimura, which is a large ship, but still a single ship. Some plot elements take place on the planet below, which is still a single planet. You get the concept that space travel is as common as driving is in our reality, but you don’t really have to do it. Fallout 3 and Gamma World are post-apocalyptic settings that are still limited in scope and location. Fallout 3 is limited mostly to a single city (plus some action in “The Pitt” and “Anchorage”) and it is still a huge setting for a video game. Gamma World, while having a larger potential area than Fallout, is still likely confined to a single planet.
Space is just intimidating. It is a potentially infinite area. I think that for most people, especially gm’s, the canvas is so large that it actually can stunt the creative process. I think that any rpg that hopes to garner a large audience would have to harness that canvas and break it into manageable bits. For example, a single planetary system. Maybe space travel over short distances is common, but longer distances have not been mastered yet. This could create an “exploring the wild frontier” feel that brings characters to the outer boundaries of what is possible in the setting and allows them to push the boundaries and expand the setting over the course of the game.
David Hill’s Maschine Zeit is another potentially good example of this. The setting is large in scope, but limited enough to make the game manageable. There are specific objectives and areas of interest: the crashed or semi-abandoned stations. Players and gm’s don’t have to concern themselves with the limitless infinity of space (unless they want to).
You may ask, “Why do people like Star Wars or Star Trek movies and books then, they’re infinite?” Yes, they are. But they are, in large part, “pre-formatted.” The audience is not involved in the design process. When the audience becomes the creator, the whole thing starts to lose appeal (and market share).
I’m not sure if this rings true to anyone else, but I’ve put a great deal of time into exploring this question as it applies to me and this is where I have arrived at this point.
Right on, Darren. I think that scope is part of the focus we talk about above, about how clear a game should be about what players do in it — that a genre or a mode isn’t enough to focus a game. As you say, sometimes (often?) that focus can come from specifically limiting the play space. I’m a big believer in this. The sandbox can be big, but it must still have edges, surfaces for the proverbial ball to bounce off of, limits on the amount of proverbial sand available for building.
As I said above, SF movies do just fine, because people like to explore new worlds and see new spectacles, but they don’t require the audience to know everything about the world, and they cannot quite play “gotcha” with the audience (e.g., by vetoing a creative decision because of something like actual science). That is, SF works just fine in authored spaces. SF video games (like Halo, Fallout, Mass Effect and Dead Space) enjoy the same relationship with the audience.
In theory, board games and card games should enjoy similar benefits of an authored space, and yet SF isn’t very well represented in those areas, compared to fantasy and history. So it goes, I guess.
I just wrote a blog post over on Geekcentricity expanding on my comment a bit. This is something I’ve been turning over in my head for a while now.
I think sci-fi board games sometimes suffer from trying to do too much within their frame. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever played a sci-fi card game.
Thanks for posting the original question.
I play mostly Sci Fi systems and I write Icar, the free Sci Fi RPG. I also review and catalogue free RPGs. I can’t speak for commercial ones because I’ve rarely played them. My comment is going to come from the standpoint of free games.
The number of free fantasy RPGs far outstrip Sci Fi ones (120 fantasy to 64 Sci Fi so far). Free games are not tied to commercial constraints of feeding one’s family or return on investment because there rarely is any. Therefore, you should expect authors to be free to express themselves to the limits of their imaginations. I got so tired of reading almost identical fantasy games that I wrote a blog post on how to avoid it.
I cannot understand it. Why rehash something so similar to that which is gone before? Where is the challenge in that? It seems that to many roleplaying and fantasy games are synonymous. When they say roleplay, they mean fantasy. By tweaking the magic system or adding a new pantheon is enough to swerve from canon. Perhaps because it is easier to write and easier to play fantasy? Perhaps because the ramifications of technological advances require more grey matter?
I agree that scope is important, not having any is bewildering. Hopefully I will have solved that problem with the next version of Icar.
On a slightly personal note, I refuse to play fantasy because it is stock and recognisable. I want games to help me understand ideas about myself and humanity as a whole and Sci Fi tends to do that for me.
Great post, by the way. Very evocative.
It seems to me that fantasy has a big advantage in creating local contexts: it’s relatively to create a compact fantasy environment in which you can set aside the details of most of the world, without it being necessarily a horror scenario. Winter, shipwreck, going into wilderness and enemy territory on scant resources, all that stuff gives you the here and now.
SF can do that. Eclipse Phase’s success is, I think, partly because localization is so embedded in the setting: there’s always reasons for it, and the characters are shaped to be prepared for it. Shadowrun offers it in the form of the mission, and hey, Shadowrun is a successful game too. Traveller has the potential for it but has seldom (in my admittedly patchy experience) done a lot with it. Basically, sf gaming is short on neighborhoods.
I’m late to the game, but have a few thoughts to add.
I play a lot of fantasy RPGs, but also love Science Fiction. But then again, I am an atheist with a philosophy degree. Why does that matter? Because I think Fantasy as a genre reinforces our cultural wishes for justice, magic and the afterlife. Many of the previous posts reference the reliance upon magic in fantasy, but I think a core part of that is the assumption of deities that play an active role in the world. Even if Dr. McCoy can cure cancer with the wave of a device, but I don’t think that pulls on our hope strings the way a heal spell or a resurrection does. By the same token, a unicorn is a powerful mythic image of the life force, while an alien creature, no matter how magnificent, is just the product of evolution and ultimately just mortal and mundane.
In short, I think science fiction emphasizes how small and mortal and alone human beings are, and that will never sell as well as the fantasy of magic and myth. Star Trek and Star Wars are notable exceptions, I think because the former is so positive and so populated, and the latter is basically high fantasy with space ships.
Many people who embrace science find wonder and beauty in the fragile existance of human life and the possibility of otherworldly strangeness. But I think many people feel lost without the idea of magic and mysticism.
This may be equally a troublesome response:
I think the lack of Sci-fi is a result of the ‘evolving’ RPG players. To paint with a broad brush, RPG players of old came from minaitures and wargamers: a hobby field known for it’s reverence of history and tendency to compulsive mathmatics. Soon enough, the hobby ensnared the Tolkien crowd and story-telling became the equal of elegant math and simulation.
But today’s crop hails from Anne Rice vampire fans and computer RPGs that do all the hard math, obvious set pathways of adventure, cliking for a solution and vidoe-game tactics. I am in no way complaining, as a new crowd is better than a stale dead hobby! But the new crowd has no interest in simulation mathmatics, which is at the heart of hard scifi.
I’m not sufficiently familiar with non-RPG markets & products, so I’ll respond in an RPG-centric way…
Justin wrote:
> Consider also the example of Traveller: When
> it first started out it was a “generic” sci-fi
> game in much the same fashion that D&D was a
> “generic” fantasy game… And it was incredibly
> popular.
I think the example of Traveller is a great counter-example, more or less popping (together with CP2020 & a few others) the “SciFi doesn’t sell” bubble; at most, we’ve got “SciFi hasn’t sold well *recently*.” Even there, apparently “Eclipse Phase” is an exception (I merely accept the assertion on this blog at face value: EP sold well).
In fact, it sounds more-correct to say that “SciFi games are often a disappointment” (market-wise: for the retailers, wholesalers, publishers & authors, all of whom (presumably) want it to do well).
However, I’ll disagree that Traveller was “generic” SciFi, as I’ve always felt that there was two great big huge pre-existing SciFi worlds that fit the “Traveller” game: Asimov’s “Empire” (pre-Foundation); with a hefty admixture of Andre Norton’s SciFi (not WitchWorld, but her spaceships scifi is very “Traveller-esque”). Most of Traveller’s variance from Asimov — Vargr and other aliens, Zhodani for the psi-powers, and other details — fit well with Andre Norton’s stories. I think one could drop an “Asimovian Empire” game into Traveller and run it 100% compatible, and an Andre Norton inspired game could fit nearly as well.
Will wrote:
> Of course, I can’t be much more specific because
> the sales data I could give you (and it isn’t
> much) for SF games isn’t mine to give away.
Yeah, marketting data is pretty short on the ground in the gaming world.
Rumor hath it that WotC did a really comprehensive market-survey, whose exact details they mostly kept confidential, but which led them to creating 3.x/d20/OGL via the realization that “adventures” mostly turned no profit for them, but instead acted more as glorified advertising (presumabally they were low-cost ads, since customers PAID for these “ads”) for the core books.
Pfr _Fate wrote:
> … simulation mathmatics, which is
> at the heart of hard scifi.
I think this is a telling point, too. Most games have a varied mix of “fiddly bits,” but I think the “hard” sci-fi genre may need more than most (and their fanbase may be more accepting of these) than the “average” rpg fanbase… possibly a sufficient disconnect to be a stumbling-block in the market?
The other thing to note, I think, is that many of the RPG’s that are/were very-popular shared one rather compelling trait: a pre-existing market. For D&D, that was the Tolkein fan & by implication most or all of fantasy fandom. For (original) Traveller, that was sci-fi fandom (for whom the Foundation Trilogy was, perhaps, held in regard like unto JRRT’s work… ) . For both, and other early RPG’s, there was just the *kind* of person who likes RPGs for whatever reason, who could discover and create the market for them. WW & V:tM, of course, tapped right into Anne Rice’s fans with a bit of cross-pollination from existing RPGdom.
I’m honestly puzzled about StarWars/StarTrek not doing better, market-wise, in their RPG incarnations — the pre-existing fanbases are surely there! — but I have a suspicion that the tv/movie fanbase doesn’t have as much overlap with the book fanbase as one might think, and RPGs obviously need (at least moderately) bookish types for success.
These days, of course, RPG standards are much higher, and the marketplace much more fragmented.
Still, it seems possible to have another vast success (for some small “rpg market” value of vast): if my ideas are right, it only awaits the right accumulation of existing fans who are used to a text-centric presentation of the game-milieu, with a solid RPG mechanic at the core of the game.
– Steve S.
Steve S. wrote: However, I’ll disagree that Traveller was “generic” SciFi
There was a reason I put “generic” in quotes, Steve. You might want to go back and re-read my original comment.
Re: Star Wars not doing better. D6 Star Wars was a huge success in the ’80s and early ’90s. WotC’s Star Wars wasn’t a success because the game was incredibly bad through at least two and a half editions.