Allow me to explain:
Taking the “Crafting Survival” genre as a prime example, why do they all have the same feeling of being cheap, amateurish, and janky af? There is just this certain something about how every single one feels to play. The differences tends to be more in the grind, progression, and aesthetics while the game feel is exactly the same. The way your character moves, the way combat feels cheesy and unbound, the often minimalisticly artistic UI (like it’s just a 50% transparent box with text/icons on it), and almost always riddled with bugs.
Even the big budget ones made by giant, long-lived developers tend to feel exactly the same as the independently made-by-one-dude-in-a-garage games. They might have better visuals, but everything else feels cheap and just to the point of functionality.
The weirdest part of this, to me, is that Minecraft doesn’t feel like this and it is basically the grandfather of the genre. It’s just every other one built in Unity or Unreal that feels like a janky ARMA module made by someone who just learned how to code. With so many developers making so many games in this genre, you’d think at least one of them would make one that feels more “luxurious.” I lament not being able to put into words exactly what I mean; it’s really something that can only be described through comparison and experience. But I have to believe others who have played games like Rust, Ark, Valheim, etc know what I mean.
Don’t get me started on the survival genre where 99% thrown into it are nothing more than just games with superficial survival elements. I’m going to stop myself right here before I write a whole essay on survival games. I’ll talk about crafting instead.
I think the issue why most crafting games feel the same is because crafting, as the process of putting things together, isn’t particularly fun especially when done in repetitions. I imagine most people don’t enjoy putting together IKEA furniture, but even the ones who do probably won’t find it enjoyable when you’re putting together the same piece of furniture for the 10th time. That would be in game crafting in a nutshell. You’ll be repeating the same moves over and over and over until all that is left of the crafting process is tedium. Factor in that for developers that would mean making a minigame within a game and it becomes pretty apparent while developers prefer to not implement the process of crafting into games. So what can developers do to replace the process? There are two options. You give players the tools to automate crafting and that’s how you get the factory builder games. The other option is to rip out the entire process and you get “in menu crafting”, which is what 99% of not factory builder crafting games use. Since crafting boils down to 1) find materials 2) craft the thing and you remove step 2 all you have left is step 1 and that again is not something you can do in a particularly interesting way. That leads to almost all crafting systems feeling the same.
I don’t think developers are copy pasting the systems, I think there’s just not a lot of design space unless you tip your toes into tedium.