[wtatum]

Minecraft has already been mentioned elsewhere, but for me the comparison point I would draw people's attention to is Banished. The genre is pretty simple in terms of concepts and the game doesn't break any new ground (just executes on the formula really well). It was developed by an exceptionally talented solo dev with decades of game dev experience who could focus specifically on what he knew his game would need, and it still took north of two years to develop and still needed additional QA help from more contributors to get over the line. For anyone looking to get started on solo or small team game dev they really should temper their expectations.

You will probably have to make a game that is smaller in scope and/or less polished than Banished, or your game will take more than a single technology generation to ship.