I think its a foul play if a project team that has a utility like privacy or swap tries to go metaverse and play2earn all of a sudden, why are developers of today like this? I just believe that they have accepted their failure and trying to look into what's currently trending but what they fail to see is that some projects have maintained their single use cases for years until their time comes around and things start going well, before play 2 earn games became a big thing today few projects have been around for quick some time.
It's not a foul play if they improved the original idea and make it better. Litecoin and other Bitcoin is almost same scenario buy they just diffon some protocol since the developers think that it's better than the original project. People has different preferences and it's normal to copy what's the trend then improve to make it better product. This is happening even in the physical market since this is what we called competition. This kind of competition makes the project strive to become better against others.
There's an exception with this, Those project that blatantly copying other project with mediocre project just to gather funds from investors.
