Sure you can, every heard of partial derivatives and sensitivity analyses?
But we would welcome you plunking down a few million on a AAA dev team with marching orders to make a hardcore RPG, and then see if you win that bet.
If A sells well there is a chance that something like A will also sell well. You have no idea whatsoever how well something that's not A will sell. It's not rocket science.
It does indeed come down to money. I'm somewhat sympathetic towards those people who are juggling the money in this industry, especially as the sums are increasing. I don't have any personal hard feeling towards people who just want to make some bucks. But subscribing to the logic that they use to justify their adversirty to risk when you're not on their payroll makes you seem a bit tardy.
I will share with you one prophetic insight. The years is 2020, and the movie version of the Silmarillion has just broken all opening records
evar:
"We realized that there are tons of people who love Tolkien's works. We thought that, you know, why not offer them a virtual form of this world on their PC's, or at least a similar world. We also realized that they would want to be somehow represented in this world in whatever form they choose, and they'd also want to have an influence on this world in some way. So, we added
attributes and
skills. People who love Tolkien also with some probability like to read, so we wanted a lot of dialogue with at least minor literary quality. Lastly, the production values had to be high, as we could deduce from other succesful fantasy offerings. There's a reason why all Tolkien movies or even Harry Potter weren't filmed in someone's basement using shakycam. People want an escape to fictional worlds, but it has to be done in some style. It all seems quite obvious now, but we must indeed be pretty brilliant, seeing as we are the first to have done so."
And we will be buried knee deep in RPG's. Herp.