Are there any scientific resources about how almost every mainstream success is based on a rather "direct" copy of something that already existed?
Like here with WarCraft/StarCraft and Warhammer/Warhammer 40,000.
Like here with WarCraft/StarCraft and Warhammer/Warhammer 40,000.
But I hear people always complaining about how Y is like X was back in the days and nothing new.
Is there any pattern behind this?
People even say "Goethe hasn't invented Faust"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coGpmA4saEk
Hardly 'scientific'... but how do you quantify copying.
The question, I ask myself, is: What is worth copying and what not?
I could imagine, that most of this success is simply luck. Everyone copies a different part of an already existing entity and those who hit the right one win.
I mean, even successful companies like Google and Apple throw stuff on the wall an see what keeps sticking and they got some of the most intelligent people around.
But one of the things that I've thought of is that copying with understanding greatly increases your 'success rate'. I think you can find that in the heart of the standard quote "Good artists copy; great artists steal". Great artists can copy with understanding and in doing so make it their own - thus steal. They now have a possession of sorts over whatever they took.
Blindly copying in the extreme case results in the literal cargo-cults. Copying with too much effort and you lose your advantage (the whole point of copying to is save effort).
Still doesn't give you a nice happy equation (or whatever) to figure out what to copy - but I think it lays down a rule of thumb that if you don't know why something works, copying it probably won't be great.