No idea. Maybe GTA Online left a sour taste.
I guess I can understand that, hah.
I just don't get it, conceptually. GTA is a genre-defining franchise... one of the first of its kind to really bloom out. I can't say for sure which concepts are new and which concepts they themselves borrowed. That's the other thing about GTA... It's such a friggin grab-bag of stuff that you can compare it to so many different things as to make doing so essentially meaningless. But the fact is that they brought together a lot of the things that now define entire subsets of open-world games. Pretty much any game of this scale and type is bound to bear similarities. So calling any game that has similar attributes a GTA clone is like trying to tell me that all modern rock bands are just Uriah Heep clones, or Deep Purple clones.
Or maybe you could think of it like a pizza. Let's say GTA was the most known pepperoni pizza... really kinda made pepperoni pizza a bigger deal than it had ever been. Now, everybody likes pepperoni pizza. There are thousands of other pepperoni pizzas out there, but everybody still has their favorite one that they will defend to the death. They'll also have that one they hate with a passion and they'll be happy to tell you about how dirty the place is.
Derivation is sort of the blood plasma of art. A vector - a platform. Imitation is a key element to it, always. Otherwise, there would be no lexicon for any medium... no steady path. Many attributes found in GTA are, at this point, fundamental to the language that is action-oriented open world game design. Says nothing about the sentences creators choose to form with those same words, or their purpose. Masons also copied eachother's techniques... or more literally
their building blocks. Ultimately, this resulted in better buildings. Well... I suppose there were also semi-secret cloisters who considered that sort of thing too sacred to let run. But nowadays we live in a society where that sort of thing isn't considered too cool. Gotta remember to pass the sauce.
I mean, I could've just skipped all of that and said that if anybody picked up CBP hoping that it was literally GTA with a different name might come out sorely disappointed. Or maybe it would just be a "not-GTA" but still something equally enjoyable, and maybe a little different in some positive ways. It's pretty obvious from everything shown over all of this time that it cannot possibly be the same experience. To be a clone, it has to stand a chance of being a full replacement.
I guess the core idea I butt up against is the whole notion that a game has to be completely, 100% original to not be bad. Mostly because that means the majority of games that large numbers of people love are bad. At which point you have to ask what that's really for. What should the purpose of a game be if not to be enjoyed? Not to mention, this game in particular has an artistic vision that no GTA game has. Plenty of things nobody would expect to see Rockstar bringing to the table. I'd rather people just be honest and say they don't like GTA and thus don't want GTA influence in their games. That actually makes sense to me. I can think of plenty of valid arguments for that.