Gaming

Might be a thing where nobody can do Skyrim better than skyrim, y'know? It's been released so many times and with so many damn mods that I'd imagine it's close to impossible to close in on that market share. Why play a skyrim-lite when I can just play Skyrim?

I guess AAA companies are too afraid to even attempt replicating the Skyrim formula in depth. Hence why the Skyrim hype in the 2010's led to (or at least was one of the reasons of) the boom of open world games. They thought stuffing a open world, random fetch quests and anything resembling an RPG level up and skill system was enough to create something like an Elder Scrolls game. Where Skyrim shines is in the little things, the details, the fact that you can move or pick a fork in a house or put a bucket on someone head and be able to steal anything in front of them, the lore and npcs, the OST. But something of this size takes time (I mean the development time for elder scrolls games is even a meme at this point), and unless you are confident in what you can create with this style, spending 5 years or more on one game that isn't guarranted to be successful and profitable is a no-go for any decision maker in a AAA company, which are pretty much the only one that could finance a game like Skyrim.