I dunno. Plenty of AAA developer spend way more money copying other people's ideas. Just look at all the battle Royale games that came from what started as a mod for ARMA which was already based on a movie that itself was based on a book/manga.
It also helps if the game is genuinely fun or interesting to play. I can tell you I’m having a hell of a lot more fun watching people play this than recent Pokemon games, and it’s making me consider dropping some money to buy the game.
Consumers are stupid. They seldom want something new, more often than not they want something familiar with a few slights twists. Movie studio's don't do reboots because they're lazy, they do it because people keep fucking going to see them.
A handful of people online complain every year about how "Sports Game Franchise '23 is just SGF '22 with some new player skins" and yet it still sells like hotcakes. If your goal is to make money, why wouldn't you do that, there's no financial incentive to spend more money on development.
I starting playing MMO's with the Ultima Online beta, and was in a number of other betas over the years. Vanguard, The Chronicles of Spellborn, etc. The number of beta players who kept shouting "it needs race X from WoW" and "why aren't there any druids like in WoW" was deafening. For decades, people talked about the next "WoW killer", which meant "a game close enough to WoW for people to migrate but maybe with slightly better graphics".
Do you know where the money gets spent when you come up with original ideas? Into the trash can. It's literally paying people to write down ideas on paper or in code, iterating, and then throwing them out, over and over again.
AAA titles also spend a truckload on voice acting and mocap. You don't need to mocap a round sheep monster. Sure, you could be incredibly stupid and pay Alan Tudyk to voice act the sheep, or pay Vin Diesal millions to say "I am Groot" 300 different ways, but no one should be ashamed for not doing so.
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I saw this game, like, 5 minutes ago and I can already say it looks bloody awful. It's like they put all the buzzwords in a hat and decided to make a game from them.
I can see bits of Fotnite, Zelda, Pokemon, and every Minecraft clone under the sun. Not a single new thing brought to the table.
Combining things that haven't been combined before is the quintessential creative act. Because as you said, there is nothing new under the sun. But there are new ways of combining those things.
You say that as if any of those games or series are truly original:
Fortnite
Fortnite just copied other survival games like Rust and Ark. Epic put their own spin on it by combining it with a battle royale - sorry, with a PUBG game mode.
Zelda
If you’re talking BoTW and ToTK, you can argue they just copied other open-world games like The Elder Scrolls and Far Cry and added a Zelda flair. Weapon degradation was even present in the older TES games.
Pokemon
Pokemon is just a kid-friendly version of the Shin Megami Tensei games without the fusion mechanic. Some of the Gen 1 Pokemon designs were also more or less lifted straight from Dragon Quest.
Minecraft
It was more or less virtual Legos when it first came out, and the survival mechanics gave it a unique spin.
So if you really wanted to, you can reduce all of the games you mentioned into their influences and what they straight-up copied. Funny thing is, these are all very well-received games because their core gameplay mechanics and designs were very good, and they added their own spin on things. Copying others isn’t a bad thing so long as you’re either iterating on it to improve it or to do something different to it somehow.
Factorio was inspired by Minecraft mods BuildCraft and IndustrialCraft, but yeah, few games have done what Factorio has, and those that have tried never quite reached it's level. Sure, there are games that feature automation with complex recipes (Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program, Shapez), but only Factorio actually managed to pull off a sense of exponential scale.
Yeah, I'm aware of the Minecraft mods, but I wouldn't have called the ideas established before Factorio came along. As for Satisfactory et al, they were inspired by Factorio itself, so obviously don't count.
Look at how little hype it had until day one of release, no one was talking positively about it
Look at people complimenting it now, talking about how it fills a niche for adults wanting to play Pokémon when it is nothing like Pokémon and that niche is already filled
Sometimes a game just takes off like this and then dies back down to reasonable levels. Remember when Valheim was released? It dropped out of nowhere, everyone and their friends played it for a month, and then it decreased down to a lower level. Sometimes a game just scratches an itch people didn't know they had and explodes for a while, which can explain why no one hears about it until the day it releases and people start telling their friends to play it too.
If you look at their site, it honestly looks like they just took their EXISTING game from a few years back (Craftopia) and cheaply re-skinned it for PalWorld.
So the cost posted might only be for the re-skinning cost too, making it even cheaper.