I really love all the different Blaseball-inspired games.
Like, no one can replicate Blaseball. Even TGB couldn't replicate Blaseball, and they _made Blaseball_. The Short Circuits and Coronation Era were neat, but it was pretty clear by the time Coronation went on permanent hiatus that the lightning had left the bottle and the game was done.
Then there were the leagues that popped up just post-Coronation. The one I know the most about was Narrative League Blaseball. It seemed pretty interesting, like they had some cool ideas for how to differentiate themselves from Blaseball while also keeping the parts they liked. The fact that there actually was canon prose was really neat. There's Terrorball, which as far as I'm aware didn't/doesn't have interactive elements? It was more about watching the game and less about actually affecting things. More Sim-driven. Another interesting take on the genre. And most recently, there's MMOLB, which leans way harder into the strat side of things. It neatly solves the PvP problem that Blaseball had, by making it so you have sovereign control over your team, and you don't have the ability to steal players or really affect other teams at all. You have much more fine control over your team, and while baseball is an incredibly random game, team-building feels much more skill-based than it was in Blaseball.
Three very different things that were core to the Blaseball experience: The writing, the watching, the playing. None of these alone is Blaseball, and I don't think any of the developers is trying to _be_ Blaseball. They're trying to make their own thing in a similar game-space.
Blaseball is irrevocably in the past. No one can bring it back, it has been Released and cannot be subject to necromancy. But it's opened up a whole new genre of game, one that's really good for small groups of people who want to watch their blorbos win and lose. And I think that's as beautiful an epitaph as any game could hope for.
