got to watching the henry stickmin franchise again, I realised how true this still holds. think about your favorite game franchises of all time; Mario, Mortal Kombat, Doom, even plot-heavy franchises like metal gear or COD started relatively simple. simple mechanics, simple stories, a simple gameloop.
This lowers the cost of development and in turn the cost to the player to try something new. If players see something they like, they'll be more likely to spend more on the sequel, and in the meantime, word of mouth advertising can get the game going.
rather than spending literal billions trying to get a new ip off the ground, studios can spend significantly less money trying new concepts and introduce more complexity as time goes on, rather than trying to hit the ground running.
The closest I've seen that would fit was Pathfinder games made by OwlCat. They did Kingmaker first and then WOTR. Kingmaker didn't do it for me because it was a rough implementation but I liked WOTR. I still had to mod the wokeness away and it made me realize there is no going back to a time where a medieval society is not going to look like modern day London or Paris and where we don't have more then half to 90% of all leaders being women.