Quote from valbar

And it makes me sad that most game developers nowadays think of video-games as a way of making money.

Quote from Hewitt

Those "clones" you are referring to are separate instances of a newly-created genre. Minecraft wasn't just about crafting. It was the first game to extensively use Voxels (with the crafting mechanic a second perk). For the longest time, games like Ace of Spades were being called "Battlefield meets Minecraft" and Cubeworld was being called "Zelda meets Minecraft". Terraria would be "Minecraft 2D".

Slender was the same; albeit, I wouldn't call it a genre in its own right. If anything, Slender itself was a "clone" of what was then called the SCP-Fangame Genre. I've already explained why I don't like SCP and Slender games in my Rank 50 topic, but that's beside the point. Personally though, I would technically call Slender an Amnesia clone. It's just Amnesia, except the monsters move real fast. Amnesia would be the grandaddy of the FPS Indie Horror Gaming genre (actually it was Penumbra but nobody really remembers that game >_>) And Outlast, is also by proxy, an Amnesia clone, if not an outright evolution.

Your argument is thus invalid because comparing it to the AAA industry, there have been such similar ventures.

Nobody knew what an FPS was in the 90s until DOOM came along. For the longest time, every FPS was called a DOOM-clone until the proper term stuck. Duke Nukem was Modern DOOM, Hexen was DOOM in Egypt, Quake was DOOM with aliens. GTA is another example. How many times have you heard of the term "GTA-clone" before it was eventually coined Open-World Sandbox? I still use the term "GTA-clone", because it is. It just fits so well.

Sleeping Dogs is GTA in Hong Kong
Stepping Up is GTA with Graffiti Artists
Driver is a shitty GTA

Quote from Hewitt

yeah and when was the last time you decided to forego gaming websites/mags and picked out a game in a store based on your own preference? I thought so.

Quote from Hewitt

How else could I respond to a guy who makes a baseless claim, citing no examples. Am I just suppose to nod my head to that?

Quote from Hewitt

Sleeping Dogs is GTA in Hong Kong
Stepping Up is GTA with Graffiti Artists
Driver is a shitty GTA

Quote from Molgera

That's because are the same genre. Yes, they are similar, but that's because they are both the same kind of genre and they aren't all exactly the same.
I could say that Battlefield is copy-cat of Call of Duty, but there a million other kinds of shoot-em-up games, so would you say they are all copy-cats of Call of Duty? It's not that easy to come up with an original idea nowadays without people yelling at your face "OMG THIS GAME IS A CLONE."

Quote from Golden

...but Sleeping Dogs is based off of the True Crime series, not GTA...