zwanzig_zwoelf
Graverobber Foundation
Who cares? With enough marketing budget, you can still make tons of $$$ by selling anything as the latest cons00mer product.And then you'll still get beaten to the market by a dozen other clones, find the marketplace is really crowded, and fail to make much money.That's not how you do it. Let indies test new concepts on their own dime, then look at the top 10 best-selling indie games and make an AAA clone of the most interesting one out of the bunch.The answer to this is basically no. The AAA studios are always chasing the next GTA5, forgetting that GTA1 was a much lower budget product that kicked off the cash cow.
Well... GTA3 kicked off the cash cow aspect, but yes. They should be making new IPs at lower budgets to avoid risk while testing concepts. Make something smaller that's a big hit with people, then make a AAA follow-up. Outer Worlds is maybe a good example of this currently, assuming MS make a bigger sequel which I'm guessing they will.
Then invest $100kk into the marketing and stress the 'innovative' aspects, and don't forget to pull the 'no one has done it before' card.
At worst you can acquire the developers behind this popular game and their clones and shut them down.