User blog comment:The Milkman/The State of Skyrim's Economy/@comment-5469467-20121122050817/@comment-2007196-20121122075531

The idea of a fluctuating economy is conceptually brilliant, but probably difficult to execute; a simple economic simulator would likely fall short in the same manner as Fable 2's "economy", while a more complex one would be a huge effort for something that's more-or-less a background feature to the main game.

I think that's the problem with the TES series, and open world RPGs in general(such as ME), they claim that their world is "living" or "breathing" or that "your choices impact everything!11! ogm!!1", but then they fail to meet the expectations they set. To make a living world like the one we live in, every minor detail or background object has to have it's own "life-story", so to speak; the shopkeepers' lives have to change according to the economy, along with the questgivers and even the generic, useless NPCs, on top of that, they'd all have to respond appropriately to your quests(I think that was one of skyrim's biggest failures - nobody notices anything you do.)

Eventually, adding all these things together, you'd end up with a game that takes much more time than estimated, not to mention the fact that there are many players who'd just prefer to skim through the game without getting too immersed, because of reasons like lack of time, having a full time job, not really being very interested in video games etc. etc. etc. Although a game with all those features would be awesome, it wouldn't make as much money with the mainstream demographic, and if there's one thing that every corporation loves, it's money.