Square Enix understood that ten years ago with Dragon Quest Builders. It feels like Atlus understood that with 3D Dot Game Heroes.

But note that these are mostly indie games. Hence the Pokémon Minecraft also being behind the times: because as far as commercial games go, the time for this would've been over ten years ago, when Minecraft was still novel enough (not yet entrenched enough) that you could peel away some of that player base by riding Minecraft's coattails.

(And if you want my own view on that genre: from the outside, it still appears too wedded to Minecraft's ideas about building, extracting, and exploring to stand out as a genre in its own right, and not just Minecraft With X.)

In line with the times because between Hytale, Vintage Story, whatever Eniko is working on, and maybe a handful of other games I'm forgetting, I've noticed Minecraft-likes coalescing into their own genre as of late.