A few things based on my own experience dealing with incomplete data sets and trying to draw conclusions from them.
Yes, it would be nice, but you can still use the data available. If the absolute numbers aren't there, you can look at the trends in the data for a story about how a product is performing. If Roll20 was the only game in town, the story would be really bad for Pathfinder 2e. However, it's not and it's not the only VTT releasing numbers. Fantasy Grounds is releasing reports, too, so we can compare the systems. Its
Q4 2020 report - the latest I can find - has PF2 at 6% of games and PF1 at 7% of games played. That's significantly higher than Roll20. However, like Roll20, more people are playing PF1 than PF2. If Foundry is like these other two - an assumption - then there will be more PF1 than PF2 players there.
But how many people are playing on Foundry? Is there a more people there than any other VTT? That question leads us to...
We know people are playing PF2 on Foundry. We don't know how many or in what proportion. All I've seen so far is people on message boards claiming this is the case. However, people who post on message boards aren't a good source of survey data because they are self-selecting enthusiasts. There may be a lot of silent people who enjoy PF2 or PF1 on Roll20 over Foundry. We can try to calculate that.
I recently found this
Reddit thread from May 2020 that has some of the companies reporting numbers. It has an interesting comment from a Foundry official. "The Foundry website recently surpassed 5,400 user registrations - user registration began in April shortly before pre-purchasing. I won't speak to license sales numbers because everyone has a different mental rubric for what it would mean for a project like FVTT to be financially successful, but numbers have exceeded my expectations by this point considering the
official release is not until later this month (May 22)." We now know they were starting with a couple thousand registrations.
How much growth could their be? It's qualitative, but let's look at other places with numbers of subscribers and make some assumptions. There are currently is less than 2000 people supporting their
patreon, Foundry's Twitter account has 12,000 followers, their Redditt has 28,000 members, and their Discord has 43,000 members. If every person their bought a license, and there is no overlap in subscribers on any of those sites, that's 80,000 people. For fun, let's say all those people play PF2 and no one plays 5E. How does that compare to Roll20? Roll20 just released that 1.5% of the accounts are playing PF2. If they still have 8 million users, that's 120,000 accounts playing PF2, more than my "for fun" estimate.
Another way to look at it is to calculate how many Foundry users there has to be to have more than 120,000 accounts playing PF2. If a quarter of Foundry license holders are playing PF2, then you would need 480,000 Foundry total licenses. If it's double what is playing on Fantasy Grounds, then it's more like a million accounts. I find it unlikely that it has that many subscribers after 1.5 years of operation.
All this to say, while people rightly say PF2 players are using Foundry, I find it difficult to believe that more people are using Foundry than Roll20 until I see some data. License sales would be a great start. Likely, the proportion of Foundry PF2 players is higher than Roll20's. If it follows Fantasy Grounds' trends, then there are likely even more PF1 players than PF2.
Final note: this all doesn't matter as long as you're having fun playing the game you like.
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