The ICO market isn’t alone in being full of new (and often completely useless) projects - the same can be said about bitcoin forks.
According to a BitMEX study, bitcoin (Bitcoin: BITCOIN) experienced 44 forks from August 1, 2017. The first, and most successful, was Bitcoin Cash (EXANTE: BCH.EXANTE). Since then, multiple forks have tanked. Their developers seem to have conjoined “Bitcoin” with any random word - Candy, Pizza, God, Faith, Diamond, Gold, Atom - thereby issuing a "new" cryptocurrency. Almost all of them failed. Only four coins (Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Private) were able to exceed a trading volume of $100 000 per day.
The reason for this lies in the open source code behind bitcoin’s software. Thanks to services such as Forkgen, even inexperienced programmers now have the opportunity to edit bitcoin software and release forks.