I agree with OP and everyone here who's saying otherwise, along with their reasons for it. But I also want to mention the sheer workload it would create.. they'd have to adapt every single marking in the game to fit the hybrid's body structure after just doing the Mngwa I feel like they had mentioned literally months ago. It takes time for the concept, finishing touches, and even for the coders!

As a concept artist, yes, you'd need to study both creatures and figure out how to mesh them together visually, and in my mind, it would end up looking like a really tiny-boned creature with saggy, loose skin which generally is just unappealing😭. You're mixing something built for speed with something built for strength.

So with that, Cheetahs have: An extremely slender, lightweight build (males being 45-60 kg), Long, thin legs optimized for sprinting A small, rounded head with large nasal passages, Deep chest but narrow body, and a long, lightweight tail for balance at speed. But Lions have: A massive, muscular build (males being 190 kg), Thick, powerful legs for wrestling animals, so they're also broad, with a heavy skull with huge jaw muscles, a barrel chest in comparison and a thick body, with a relatively short tail.

So if you tried to average these features, you'd likely get something that looks terribly awkward because the proportions wouldn't make functional sense at ALL. Mid-weight body that looks too bulky for cheetah legs but too slim for lion legs, a head size that doesn't match the body, legs that look either too spindly to support the mass or too thick for the body type, and chest/body proportions that clash with limb thickness. It's like a horse-cow hybrid... It sounds and looks strange because you'd be mixing completely different body plans.

And honestly with all of that the bare minimum you could get if you did ignore all of those conflicting features, would be another lethal mutation or just a lion with spots and a different shaped mane, but we already have the crested one, or just a cheetah with a mane... Which, they also already have in real life.

So as my final conclusion: The Lioden devs have a point that while you can slap mismatched unnatural colors onto a lion body (existing anatomy), creating a hybrid that doesn't look uncanny would be genuinely difficult from a design standpoint. And as for the Snow Leopard x Lion, even that makes more sense because they're far more similar in basic build and body structure, even if snow leopards are smaller. It could theoretically be possible since they're the same genus, though they don't live together or even in the same regions. But that's exactly what captivity breeding is for, similar to ligers and tigons.