I wonder if this could work for games in the same way it does for music. With music there is a significant "brand" around the artist to the point where the succ

I wonder if this could work for games in the same way it does for music. With music there is a significant "brand" around the artist to the point where the success of some artists seems to be more down to their image and persona than their actual music. This means that a cover version of a song performed by some tribute band is not really a substitute in any way for a performance by the real artist even if the cover band can reproduce the original with very high accuracy. Game developers don't really have the same halo and fame surrounding them, so perhaps customers would be happy with a cheaper clone of a game provided that the assets etc were of at least a similar quality to the original even if not identical.