Mechalich wrote:
The best chance to launch a competitive space fantasy was 2015 - to try and maximize on the temporary absence of Star Wars from the genre and to ride the wave of betrayed feelings prior to the release of Force Awakens. it was the best opening against that particular leviathan that anyone was likely to ever get.
Going forward now doesn't seem likely to get very far.
This depends entirely on whether you're catering to/going after the hardcore sci-fi nerds who, upon seeing Episode 1, decided "I'm not going to watch episodes 2 or 3. At least I still have* Star Gate, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Firefly...", or for the vast majority (people who aren't actually into our niche interests and just know of the big cinema hits, and overall nerd-types who are mostly gamers or fantasy nerds or weebs, who have a side-interest in sci-fi, mainly as pertains to their core interest).
Because if you want to go after the crowd who care a lot about sci-fi and have a whole bunch of series they like, then absolutely the Star Wars crash was the time to start throwing ideas about, including licensing everything else for games to see what would stick.
But for the main audience, sci-fi actually IS Star Wars, so the prequels caused the entire genre to die as far as they were concerned and saying "Hey, this game is set in space with aliens and laser guns!" is met with some variant of "Why bother?" or "Too soon". I get that suggesting this on a nerd-culture forum is likely to get me killed, but it's essentially the same as how all of White Wolf (and gothic dark fantasy as a whole) is actually Vampire and the rest is just an aside to that, living and dying solely based on the success of the big one. So if you are interested in mainstream people (who likely aren't into roleplaying to begin with, what with it still being a niche thing) or to people who just dip their toe in but mostly want D&D or Conan or Sailor Moon, then you need to cash in on the success of Star Wars when it succeeds, and drink heavily when it fails.
*I haven't checked which of these were actually around back then. I'm pretty sure New Doctor Who wasn't a thing by then, but we're talking about people who had old VHS tapes so whatever.