Ragtag Bunch of Misfits (TV Tropes)
A "Motley Crue", in fiction, is your typical band of adventurers/heroes which every single team member is different in each aspect. Think Gunardians of the Galaxy, but sometimes even mismatched :P
In Starfinder, due to the numerous alien races, your typical party will likely stand out of the crowd as each member is a different race. In sci-fi fiction, that usually passes pretty well without anyone being bothered.
I do remember that in Pathfinder, Paizo tried to keep the PC races at a minimum to avoid this particular problem, as it does not fit THAT well in a fantasy game. I did hear James Jacobs not liking the idea of having a party made of weird races, as legal as they are.
It's definitely a lot easier to never have a human in the party, and it certainly doesn't feel odd within the default setting.
Right now I'm in a game with a party that consists of a Ryphorian, an Android, a Vesk, a Borai, a Gray, a Sarcesian, a Dragonkin, and an Ice Troll (a player race version of the monster that we homebrewed, since trolls are a big part of our setting). All the characters feel pretty different, and it's fun seeing how the group gets on.
This was one of those things that makes me glad I'm never likely to play in a game Jacobs dm's.
But yeah, it seems to be a lot easier due to interplanetary & interstellar travel being ubiquitous. Even pre-spaceflight races like the morlamaws(my dyslexia hates that name) or kish seem like the types who'll take any chance they can get to get off world when a Pact World ship visits them, putting them in place to join a party from the start.
In campaigns, I tend to see no duplicate PC races. Organized Play doesn't fit that mold, really, but it's pretty close.
In the admittedly limited selection of games I've run or been part of, it hasn't been uncommon for two PCs to share a race, but I don't think I've ever seen more than that, and not sharing a race been about as common.
My RL game started out as two Androids, a Lashunta, an Ysoki, and a Vesk, though the Ysoki went NPC fairly early on due to RL issues for the player.
None of my RL game's backup characters share a race - Drow (sort of), Space Goblin, SRO, and Human - those are the characters that come out for one shots when someone has to miss a Dead Suns session.
One of my current forum games has two Lashunta, the other (huge game - 8 players, so less surprising) has two Shirren.
My short-lived Discord game didn't have any PCs who shared a race, and the follow up to that one that's in the works doesn't look like it will, either.
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Yeeaah, in starfinder its much easier to play party full of non human like races because majority of aliens you meet are also non human like, so from their point of view humans are just as alien as other races so they would react similar way "OMG aliens" rather than preferring human like races to interact with.
I do remember that in Pathfinder, Paizo tried to keep the PC races at a minimum
Really? My impression of many a Pathfinder party has been more in tune with this for a long time. The last PF game I played in literally had "nobody is playing a dragon" as one of the up-front player-guide rules.
Starfinder does, it's true, allow one to lean hard into being a collection of wacky aliens completely guilt-free.
Okay, so, currently there are 51 playable races between the CRB, AA, Pact Worlds, Dead Suns, and society scenarios.
Of these at least 38 are native/resident to the Pact Worlds/Veskarium systems and as such I would argue, are fairly common place. Some potentially more so than the core races; I would suspect, for instance, that there are more Ryphorians or Verthani in the Pact Worlds than there are Vesk or Kasatha.
Of the other 13, they may require various degrees of contrivance but so far as I can tell none of them have write ups that suggest the players of that given adventure are the first known explorers from the pact worlds to encounter them making it extremely unlikely to impossible for them to show up. For most of them I'd liken it to playing someone from the Dragon Empires in the Inner Sea region; uncommon but plausible. Nothing that rises to the level of, for example, playing a Munavri on the surface of Golarion.
The only two that I would personally hesitate to allow would be the grays & reptoids, who strike me more as having been statted up to allow DM's to stat up villains rather than as player options. But I could be convinced if I trusted the player enough.
Outside of what's been statted up, I went through the "beyond the pact worlds" section of the core book, Pact Worlds, and a few other sources and have personally counted 16 named sentient species that could potentially end up as playable races - at least one of them has been all but confirmed for AA2. Of these sixteen, three are Pact World natives, so again, should be relatively common place in the system.
Aside from that, no less than 25 races have been mentioned but not named, six of which come from the Veskarium and are likely going to be statted up in the Veskarium book that everyone is speculating we're going to get next year; those likely wouldn't be terribly uncommon in the Pact Worlds.
I'd say it's easier to "go wild" in Starfinder with "strange" races. Between the Core Rulebook (including the "Pathfinder Legacy" section), Alien Archive, and Pact Worlds books, there are quite a few more explicitly playable races for PCs than existed for Pathfinder within the first year of release. Several of them also push farther from the "normal" (i.e., human-like) standard fantasy races.