You ask about “success”, by every person has a different interpretation of “success”. Everyone’s heard the saying that there’s a key to success, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their is a single door, or doorway, to success.
What’s your goal in creating this project? Are you doing it for profit? For fame and acknowledgement? Out of sheer boredom? Because you like the game’s idea? Or something else entirely?
Once you understand what your reason for starting your project is, then you can start to think about this question. Originality is both scary and subjective. Simulators, obbies and tycoons may be seen as “unoriginal”, whereas story games may be seen as “original”. I’m not going to delve into the intricacies of this here, however when taking into account (generally), “original” games are harder to pull off than an unoriginal game due to the unoriginal game being only able to be cast as unoriginal due to the fact that its widespread, therefore telling us that it DOES, in fact, have a large constant player base, but due to the fact that newer ones keep appearing and the, generally, “repetitive” gameplay, they don’t last long. However, if you manage to successfully create an original game, which you keep somewhat regularly updated, you can obtain a steady playerbase that will be able to outlive that of an unoriginal game, though getting to this point is what makes it more difficult.
If your goal of success is fame or acknowledgement, an original game will help with some of the older playerbase, whereas unoriginal games (notice the plural form) will allow you to gain some with the younger playerbase - however, these aren’t excluded to the both of them.
If you want income, unoriginal games are likely to provide large, fast income over a short period of time, before dying out, whereas an original game is likely to provide income over a larger period of time when invested into.
If you’re doing it for out of boredom or because you want to, then go for it! It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make the front page, just ask a few of your friends or community (if you have one) to take a look at it, and if they like it, hurray, there are people that enjoy what you’ve made! If they don’t, at least YOU had fun making it and probably developed your skills further in both game design, your respective development fields and possibly even marketing. A game you enjoy making is more easy to create, for you, than one that you absolutely hate, as well as prove to be more easy to update.
Here is a link I made a while back that is incomplete and I haven’t gotten around to updating and, honestly, has way too many jokes in comparison to the actual content, though perhaps you’ll learn something from it.