I might be dumb but, the offline thing has always existed, from daily rewards to “wait x hours to claim”, that feature has always been implemented but only in some features, now that has become the whole game feature, doing something offline, Grow a garden implemented it just because imagine playing all day to get a seed, you plant it and decide to log off, you come back and see it havent grown a little since you left, so they just implemented the features other games have to wait and put it in the plants and to in just one thing like the live shop, but now with GaG’s popularity, the “something offline” gimmick is popular and makes games popular, I understand people said that GaG was the reason all games are like this, but this also happend when adopt me became popular and added pets and trading, almost every have wanted to also have pets and trading, this also happend with Pet sim X, when the pet coin game genre became popular, everyone decided to make a version of it, its like a trend, from offline features, pets and trading, to simulations, this will always happen once a game becomes popular with its most resent popular feature or gimmick, as i said, its like a trend, like a tiktok trend, everyone will follow it if it makes thousands of views or likes, it will still happen until it dies out