Interesting. My take on it is that if you are selling a Star Wars game and I want to play Star Wars, I’m more likely to play your game than a generic Sci-Fi game that can emulate Star Wars. My reasoning is that if I want to play Star Wars, then I might as well buy a Star Wars game that’s done setup for Star Wars. I don’t want to buy generic Sci-Fi and then have to do all the heavy lifting of putting Star Wars into it.

The opposite can also hold true. Say you are selling Game of Thrones the RPG. I don’t want to play GoT, So I’m not going to buy your RPG. However I still like the concept of GoT in a broader sense so I’d be more inclined to support a generic fantasy RPG that emulates the political, grittiness and scope of GoT. This would be as opposed to just playing DnD which isn’t really setup mechanically to do that, again unless I put in a lot of work.

Then you have your totally original idea. First you have to explain the idea to me and then try and sell me on it. There’s definitely more upfront work to pitching an original idea. From a design perspective it’s got the biggest freedom to create and tell the type of game you want. So I see that as a huge draw. But selling people on it is certainly more of a climb because you aren’t marketing to fans of Star Wars or GoT you are marketing to a void and hopefully you aren’t the only one in it.