Imitation is the most poorly thought out form of flattery....

http://mattgemmell.com/2011/11/27/copycats/

Great article analysing the effects of integrating someone else's design decisions in your product.  Very insightful.

This is especially insightful for the thread that has been running through my head for the past week about iterative improvement on existing game designs.  Similar problem and the same flaws.  Making anything me-to is just dooming yourself to failure on many fronts.

Its interesting to look at the media space after reading this article, with the number of me-to's, franchies and tie-in products... even the same product done across multiple platforms has elements of this kind of failure built in.

The argument that goes... "which is better the book or the film?" is often decided simply by which one the speaker saw first.  The other is always a copy.  It's interesting with the case where there is a movie derived from a book; and you see the movie first knowing that there is a book with a different treatment... its always hard to not see the compromises in the movie that have been made to fit the media and genre conventions.

There is much to think about....