It’s hard to say tbh, Skyrim offers a great base to mod off of, the scripting system is very strong too(only held back but slow refresh times) and tools are freely available and easy to uae to create these mods, I assume aswell the fact there’s not been another TES game to pull people away and the general state of gaming over the last decade, people are going back to it

Also tons of people myself included make mod lists but never play

You say easy installation of mods, but an alarming large amount of people still fail to install mods correctly

Sorry, I didn’t read your message as a complaint about the tools be easy, but making things accessible will defo bring in larger numbers of people, sadly :(

Ah yeah the modding tools being very new user friendly is defo a big thing that has lead to this, I think the lack of a new TES game and the insane explosion of high quality popular mods has brought more people into the scene too

Oracle remakes maybe?

I guess Planetside 2, it made me upgrade my PC 3 separate times

The skyrim modding landscape has got so much worse in recent years, so many mod users are so self entitled, dumb, and very demanding it’s so disappointing seeing this niche area getting so much worse thanks to more and more people flocking to it