Personally, each case comes down to a gut feeling, but there are some easy ones to write off: But since I don’t give a shit about either and they’re both incredibly arbitrary and inconsistent, the real thing that determines it is just… what your gut says. Bloodstained openly being marketed as a continuation of the “Igavania”.Īll of these cases can be argued either way, but ultimately come down to the law and the policies of storefronts like Steam.Candy Crush being only a slightly different version of Bejeweled.Minecraft essentially starting with Hatsune Miku wanting to do more with the idea of Infiniminer after its development stopped.Capcom losing a lawsuit against Data East over Fighter’s History “copying” Street Fighter II.

Are battle royale games clones or just a new multiplayer mode ala team deathmatch?.Angry Birds basically being just a flash game that been copied hundreds of times.Not that the presence of other copycats should convince you its ok, its just that other games doing similar things makes me think this is more of a sub-genre thing rather than a straight copy thing.

Vambrace: Cold Soul did the same “take what we like from DD and a roguelike Slay the Spire map and tweak it the way we want” I think this feels more like Darkest Dungeon (and Slay the Spire since you mentioned that) hitting people in a way that resonates and spawns a mini subgenre in the way that Dark Souls has done.

This feels like “Darkest Dungeon but more of what we want” and as someone who has been begging for someone, anyone, to make a good modern Final Fantasy Tactics ripoff for years, I’m pretty sympathetic to that. Since it can feel like the DD team put all the work in to make a cool system and then another team gets to skip that initial step.īut I feel like there is, and should be, room for devs to look at something they like and say “we have ideas on how to do this in a slightly different way that appeals better to our personal sensibilities”Īnd I think they go into that in the attached article. I can see how you’d feel uncomfortable with it.

Games like xcom or darkest dungeon