Just dividing up the market between two (or a few more) pretty much identical products/offerings is how many mature products end up. It happens because because for, say, two competitors in a market, the marginal return on investment for trying to capture more market drops off, and if they all try to be the only provider... there's a chance the other one will win that game so it's easiest and less risky to just divide up the market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
It happens a lot...
CVS / Walgreens
Home Depot / Loews
...
My product: https://emojirades.pages.dev/
A daily emoji + charades game where users are shown 3 emojis and have to guess the word.
With regards to gameplay and being a "daily" game, I drew inspiration from Wordle: https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
Ironically, my product is to come up with product ideas: https://insanelygood.tools/ideas
What I've noticed is that most products are trying to solve one singular problem but in different ways.
people approach problems differently.
look at linear, asana, trello, jira, and shortcut for example. similar problems, but different approaches. different tastes, different preferences.
aws, gcp, azure, digitalocean, hetzner, vultr too. similar problems, similar solutions, differing interfaces and differing quality of support.
My product: https://onlineornot.com/
My competitors: there are thousands, and yet we still solve the same problem in different ways
Why do we have multiple products for the same problem?
At a very simple level...someone sees opportunity. That is, they believe can do it better, and sometimes they do.
Walmart wasn't the first discount store.
Facebook wasn't the first social network.
The iPod wasn't the first mp3 player.
Etc.
Where things go wrong is that very often competitor converge (into a sea of sameness) instead of diverging (each into less competitive markets). Perhaps we are wired for conflict and to fight toe to toe, instead of fleaing and prospering elsewhere?
In any case, for more details on why and how to avoid cookie-cutter-ness:
- Zero to One https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_to_One
- Blue Ocean Shift https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/what-is-blue-ocean-shift/
Of course there are other sources of inspiration.