[reitzensteinm]

We win when game developers build off each other's ideas, even making an improved version of what came before, but direct clones serve only to reduce the reward for innovators, so I strongly disagree that it's a win for the market place. Look at casual games for an example of a market that basically crashed when developers started spending all their energy cloning successful titles instead of trying to create something fresh.

As a personal example, search for Robokill in this game's release forum post:

https://www.mochimedia.com/community/forum/topic/game-showca...

I'm not bitter - Robokill did well and I'd be surprised if they made even 5% as much as I did - but it's hard to argue that the market place is better off because this game exists. Robokill itself is not in any way original - it's basically a mixture of Smash TV and Diablo - but I think it was a fresh enough take on existing genres to earn its place in the market.

As long as this Minecraft inspired title tries to be different in some way, though, I have no problem with it.