If a different company can make the same game, but better, then more power to them. They'll have to overcome the wall of players that "dont want to play another horizon" as well as innovate to make it feel fresh.
If someone made a copy of legally-distinct bloodborne it would do beyond amazing if enough effort and love was put into it.
All of this to say, if the game is a cash grab with tracky drm or microtransactions then its not going to do well if it is like that PLUS a 'rip-off' of another game.
Just don't preorder and see if its a cash grab first. Extremely difficult for some i know.
Tencent owns Digital Extremes as of a few years ago, and last I knew its monetization wasn't too bad. So maybe there's a slim chance they'll take a lesson from that?
I'm sure that's a stretch though since DE built up their payment model many years prior and were bought when they were already successful with a large playerbase. A new franchise is likely a very different story.
Yeah, remains to be seen but even Palworld got flack for copying Pokemon's style even if it was a good game which I enjoy. I saw an article just a bit ago where the palworld developer was interviewed and he stated he felt he was still under the shadow of the AI copying accusations.
Still like you said, it's one thing to copy an art style, another to actually make a good and compelling game.
From the trailer I saw it looks like a hybrid of Horizon, Monster Hunter, and Dragon's Dogma. If it's free to play it's almost guaranteed not to be single player, so there's that as well.
and yet china claims to be winning and winning. LOL.
the chinese youth will have a hard time with no good jobs.
but hey, xi is ruler for live...so good for the rest of the world because china invents nothing of relevance these days. yes, they steal like chatGPT but their conclusions are worse.
i for one welcome china to keep failing at everything. if you have no citizens being able to think free, you'll have to keep on copying.