twesterm on 28 November 2010
A lot of games do that and fail. They will try to copy the core concepts and then completely miss what made that game special. Sometimes games are simply released in the right place at the right time and that's why the copy fails or other times they're missing one of the more subtle parts of the games and that's why it fails.
Either way, games constantly borrow from other games, that's half of what being a designer is all about.
