Allow me to explain:
Taking the “Crafting Survival” genre as a prime example, why do they all have the same feeling of being cheap, amateurish, and janky af? There is just this certain something about how every single one feels to play. The differences tends to be more in the grind, progression, and aesthetics while the game feel is exactly the same. The way your character moves, the way combat feels cheesy and unbound, the often minimalisticly artistic UI (like it’s just a 50% transparent box with text/icons on it), and almost always riddled with bugs.
Even the big budget ones made by giant, long-lived developers tend to feel exactly the same as the independently made-by-one-dude-in-a-garage games. They might have better visuals, but everything else feels cheap and just to the point of functionality.
The weirdest part of this, to me, is that Minecraft doesn’t feel like this and it is basically the grandfather of the genre. It’s just every other one built in Unity or Unreal that feels like a janky ARMA module made by someone who just learned how to code. With so many developers making so many games in this genre, you’d think at least one of them would make one that feels more “luxurious.” I lament not being able to put into words exactly what I mean; it’s really something that can only be described through comparison and experience. But I have to believe others who have played games like Rust, Ark, Valheim, etc know what I mean.
I think this might be a bias towards the sample taken, given how easy it is to make a game these days, you can probably say the same abot any genre given the right sample.
If you want examples of survivalcraft that might not fit that (subjective) model, there’s stuff like sons of the forest or Terraria.
You might feel tempted to say these are exceptions, but I’d argue that anything that is more common would by definition fall into same-y-ness
I also want to add that the ui problem goes beyond genres.