It's a product by a company whose goal is to make money. Since it's a relatively niche product, the price needs to be fairly high to recoup costs, even if you consider that this may make people buy a ps5/games who would otherwise not. It will not be cheap.
Minecraft does have the mechanic where villager towns can get raided by evil villagers and you have to defend against a bunch of waves, maybe that's where some of the inspiration came from.
The producer of this is the same guy who's been in charge of FF14 and that game has almost entirely kept to its fairly tight schedule for the past 8 years until covid happened, so I don't think this will be anywhere near as bad as XV in terms of development time. Also, 14 has one of the best...
Aw, the front page behavior changed. Before if you removed all sidebar content with the customization, the main blocks would become bigger and fill the rest of the space, now it's just empty.