Btw: Zoo Tycoon or Roaler Coaster Tycoon are a bit different i think...

Simpler "business sims" like these do quite well as far as economic simulations go. But I suspect you're referring to games which are a bit more in-depth.

think of it as a scale, at the low end you have low complexity, mass appeal, and not too much thought required.

at the high end you have high complexity, niche market, and "I swear I have the necessary grey matter required to enjoy your games." - as Avalon Hill used to say.

I think economic sims need drama to be popular in the US market. (I don't know a lot about other markets, though I have also heard someone say that German board games tend to be more complex and abstract than board games designed in other countries. This could be compared to the cultural difference that Japanese players used to expect RPGs do be much more difficult than western players, which sometimes resulted in difficulty changes when creating English versions of Japanese games.) But back to the idea of Drama. Drama isn't quite the opposite of abstraction, but you cannot have abstract games that are highly dramatic. Drama is the connection of emotion to plot, o in this case gameplay. Drama requires a strong theme (or a weak theme plus explosions). Economic sims tend to lack explosions, unless you count bad ends where the player goes bankrupt or is bought out in a hostile takeover or something like that. Or random disasters like in Sim City. Economic sims also tend to lack the kind of emotion found in RPGs, involving things like monsters, mysteries, jealousy, death... but the tycoon games that are popular in the US use the frame story or mission briefings to add these kinds of emotion to the game, and also cute or cool graphics and exciting music and funny or heroic gameplay to support the emotion introduced by the story. How well the game does this is the difference between whether it's popular or whether it's the same as 100 other older economic sims.

though I have also heard someone say that German board games tend to be more complex and abstract than board games designed in other countries.

Yes, this is even true (as a tendency) if you consider German German-style boardgames vs. North American German-style board games. The German ones aren't necessarily more complex in the strategic sense, but there tends to be more manipulation of lots of little pieces of different kinds and functions. (Hal Barwood's giant collaborative list of game design maxims suggested that when designing for the German market, don't take away the player's ability to micromanage.) And the connection between mechanics and theme is often a little looser; you could more easily "re-skin" the game without changing the mechanics.

There's a parellel to videogames there, too, which I didn't think about until you brought up emotion and RPGs. North American German-style boardgames (variously called "Ameristyle", "Ameritrash", or "Thematic" games) have a greater tendency to go for immersion in a dramatic theme, role-playing elements, "hero" pieces with distinct powers, and the creation of high-tension situations. (Like consider Pandemic a prototypical example, with maybe Puerto Rico as the prototypical Eurostyle game.) This is the same thing we see in a lot of videogames, with a notable exception of German-style economic sims.

Didn't know Germans are more into economic +/ simulation games even though TransOcean and " <Whatever game is about> Simulator <Year> " games are around.

But in my experience, they aren't popular and are popular far less than when I was young ( Sim Series (Tower, City, Farm, Earth, Ant) , TTD, Railroad Tycoon series etc etc). They have to fight for even smaller slice now.

I'm from Russia and I love economic simulators but it depends of their theme. For instance, I love Theme Park and Theme Hospital very much, I love mafia-related simulators and simulators of state economics and global economics. But I never played (and probably never will) any type of industrial simulators, just because I'm not basically interested in vehicles, oil industry or anything else of such type.

'Cuase they're fascists, duh! *cough* No really, what are you on, crack? The sales from my experience for my economic sim were equally well distributing with North America, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, etc. from the thousand few sales I had.