This is the most important question to ask both as a game investor and for game developers before they commit to what might be a multi-year long journey.
For any non-gamers reading this, gamers are well and truly backlogged and spoiled for choice nowadays. Nowadays the tools used by professional game developers are also available for free to the general public. The difficult part isn't making a game anymore but the hard part is making something that is truly unique and worth making time for. Despite the backlog issue, gamers seem to have no problem buying mountains of games that they'll not play for quite awhile or maybe very little in the end. However if a player can put off playng your game, it isn't much of a jump to also defer purchase.
It's natural to want to emulate your heroes or to copy/tweak a game formula that already exists. However the biggest advantage of being an indie (if fortunate enough to get a chance (maybe from us!) is that you are making your own game and it can be ANYTHING you want it to be. No one is telling you what to make so why not make something where nothing like it exists currently? In a world where there's an ocean of lookalike games, the riskiest bet is also the safest bet.
If you wanted to work on stuff similar to others' then you're better off working on others' games vs risking your own or our money. Ultimately when we invest we're also investing for a best possible scenario where you wouldn't have to rush or feel constrained financially to "push out something quickly" since we already know that rushed or derivative products are lose-lose for all of us. As Shigeru Miyamoto said - "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad," . This may be less true nowadays where games can be patched into something else entrely and into redemption, but we're only paying for you to get something released the first time. Best to get it right, you may not have the revenue to get it right evenutually.