CI's fault. FDEV have published a game, which they are building on. CI has not. CI has raked in hundreds of millions on promises, most of which they have not delivered. It's squarely THEIR problem.
Not to be mean, but I sincerely doubt FDEV would try to copy anything CI does, given CI's track record. 'course, if they want to add lethal elevators and trapdoor ramps, then they know where to look... Sorry, I could not that resist that jibe -- CI had it coming.
You have to remember that the average backer who's running with the “copying from CI¬G” narrative has been so thoroughly indoctrinated as to believe that their standard practice of everything from simple tracing to plagiarism to outright copyright violations and IP theft is not just the norm, but actually the pinnacle of design sense. The notion that there might be genuine creativity — that you might come up with your own ideas and have your own artistic, aesthetic, and design vision — is thoroughly alien to them.
Consequently, since CI¬G is the bestest company — CRobber says it is — and only ever steal ideas, this means that worse companies also only ever steal, except worse. Since CI¬G has already stolen everything from everywhere, any idea that vaguely comes from the same reference pool is stolen from CI¬G and if this supposed chain of events should happen to violate causality and require
euthanasia coaster-style loops in spacetime to make sense, then so be it. Time is bunk anyway — CRobbber says it is.
Like, literally. You can find posts where yet another new ship blatantly copied from another space game is being rolled out, where backers are confused about who copied whom, never mind that the other space game has had that ship for years or even decades. But who can say who did what first and in what direction time flows when you know development started in
2012 2011 2014 2013 2016 2010 2014 2017 — CRobber says it did.