Subnautica copycats

Victor32

Has anyone noticed the rise of SN copycats on Steam? Ever since SN has gained popularity, underwater games started popping up like mushrooms after the rain. I won't give any names here, because I don't want to give them free advertising, but we have a diving game with a barely clad babe diver, an open world adventure game, a survival game with giant sharks... I could go on. Some of them look good, some of them look bad, but my point is: they can be terribly misleading.

A long while ago, I caught a glimpse of a SN video over someone's shoulder in a coffee shop. I didn't catch the game's title, but I loved the visuals. I was, however, out of town, had no computer access, and to be frank, I forgot about it for a while. Fast forward a couple of weeks, I remembered that pretty underwater game I once saw, so I went on steam, determined to find it and insta-buy it. First thing recommended in the store was a game with this description:

"Use the environment to gather resources, build a base to refill your oxygen and manage all your items, craft equipment and weapons to explore and protect yourself in the Ocean depths, create an in-base farm or go fish hunting to feed yourself... Your ultimate goal is to find all the pieces of your submarine, fix it and reach the surface."

I was overjoyed - I found THE game! I clicked to see the screenshots and... I cringed, and cringed, and cringed. Well, I thought to myself, memory sure is fickle thing, I honestly thought it was prettier. With a disappointed shrug I closed steam and went about my business.

It took two months and Jacksepticeye's YouTube video of Subnautica to show me how much I had been misled... and now I'm here. Moral of the story? Don't fall for the copycats.

Kouji_San

Yeah, happens all the time in Video Game Land

Super Mario Bros/Megaman -> the uprise of more and more badly designed 2D platformers from devs who had no idea what made them tick

Fast forward to a more recent spamfest of a genre

Minecraft -> clones (well Minecraft was itself a clone soooo)
Zombie survival games -> Here we go, spam the steam store with those badly designed hardly working pre-pre-alphas
Many many openworld survival -> A derivative of those zombie survival games?
Heck even Team Fortress 2 had a very odd Chinese "TF2 inspired" game (China is good in knockoff or rather straight ripoff products)

Stick with the original devs of a genre, they know what they're doing. I'd say 7/10 of the "inspired" devs tend to just copycat for a quick buck, not even finishing a game sometimes. Perpetual alpha status, usually without any original ideas of their own so they are kinda stuck coming up with stuff that sets their game apart from the rest and fail to succeed...

Ripoff disguised as inspired by... Good thing Subnautica gets a lot of press from the weirder YouTubers

It's not just contained to Video Game Land, just look at TV, the movie industry, Music, actual store products. We only have a handful of creative people with original ideas, the rest tend to get "inspired by". Probably why we need patents and copyright laws, because of bastards

If I may... Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now
[bangs on the table]
You're selling it, you wanna sell it. Well... - Dr. Ian Malcolm

failhelm

Saw this with ARK too, but meh, the others don't stand up to the original. I cannot see how any game could compete with Subnautica. I certainly won't pay to find out!

Halios

I hadn't noticed any and Steam normally won't stop pestering me about survival games. I think I know at least a few of the ones you're talking about and I don't really think they are SN copies.

Sci-fi aquatic survival on an alien planet and no guns. I think SN still has that market all to itself.

Metacom

That's why we have user reviews on steam. It's alot of what originally sold me on Subnautica, plus it was on sale at the time. Also, youtube "lets play"s are very helpful.

Dagon

Yeah, months ago when I went to buy the game I was presented with an entirely different game that had more complex base building, but not seascapes that I would want to explore.