It seems to me that even with its rocky start, once it was clear how successful Cyberpunk 2077 was, it would be a no-brainer to start developing a Shadowrun game. Because all of those players are going to finish it and replay it again and again want something new to scratch that itch.
Kind of.
The trouble is 2077 was so successful for three hard-to-replicate reasons:
1) It was intensely hyped for most of a decade. This actually caused problems too, but that's a separate discussion. And this wasn't dev-driven hype really, the was fan-driven (again, which lead to problems).
2) A lot of that hype was because for much of the development, The Witcher 3, from the same company, was regarded as the best RPG ever or at least recently made. I think TW3 has faded a lot recently in people's estimations to "a pretty good RPG" but still, it was seen that way. The modern equivalent would be the aura Larian has right now after BG3. Many people would just absolutely buy anything Larian made.
I wouldn't, personally, and I felt the same way re: CDPR and 2077, but I think I might just have a built-in contrarian streak which means the more people hype a specific games company the more critical an eye I cast on them (this also applies inversely to some extent, so I'm not saying it's a good thing - I am little overgenerous to what I perceive as small/underdog companies too, and janky games).
3) CDPR were a genuinely exceptionally talented company (maybe still are, in fact they might even be better now, to judge from Phantom Liberty) with incredible artists, musicians and so on, and I'm going to be real here - that's not true of all AAA companies, not by a long shot. I would not say it was fully true of Larian, for example, god bless them. I don't think have the same level of skill artists that CDPR had. And CDPR had the money to go full-on AAA, no (or very few) compromises (2077 cost $174m).
(What CDPR was missing, though, was strong gameplay design - TW3 actually has rather flaccid and weak and easy-to-break gameplay. Not Skyrim-bad but not Dragon's Dogma sharp, either. 2077 had slightly better gameplay but it was pretty mediocre in actual gameplay terms until 2.0. But that's a whole other discussion).
So like, if a company decided to make an SR game, I think unless they had a long record of excellent RPGs, which literally no-one buy CDPR and Larian have right now (Owlcat are getting there, Expanse will be make or break), they'd be regarded with some skepticism, and anything they were doing/saying given a more critical eye by gamers than 2077 was.
But I don't think any of that is the real reason we didn't see a Shadowrun game, and probably won't see one.
The real issue specifically for Shadowrun is the licence is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft are in a bizarre corporate self-inflicted position where they own several of the world's top AAA games companies, but they've completely unnecessarily and gratuitously decided that they're not going to "interfere" with any of those AAA companies by telling them what to do or saying "That's a rubbish idea, don't do that", or even by giving them significant funding to let them do bigger/better (which is particularly funny because everyone expected that MS would do that). They're just sort of letting them do their own thing. And because MS owns the licence, not any of those companies, and MS isn't interfering, it would have to be that one of those companies came to MS to request the licence.
Which I don't think will happen.
Bethesda are completely and totally drunk on their own Koolaid, high on their own supply, believing their own propaganda, whatever you want to call it. They don't think anyone else in the industry knows jack about jack (putting in an Eric's grandma-friendly way), and they think their top guys are all incredibly talented and faultless, even though many of them are obviously incompetent in fundamental ways (looking at you, Pagliarulo, Howard!). The last thing they'd do would be ask to use an IP they didn't own.
Obsidian seem to have got to the place Bioware got to in the early-mid 2000s, where they've decided other people's licences are just too much of a risk, and limit the profit potential. I have no doubt that if MS brought SR to them, and said "please do a first-person one-world-ish Shadowrun RPG" that Obsidian would want to do it, and do a good job. I am sure they would rock it. People sneer a little at Avowed and OW2 but they're showing clear strong steady design improvement and frankly they're in a better place in a lot of design ways (maybe not writing ways) than CDPR was even when 2077 was released. But MS is letting them just focus on their own IPs. It's not even making the genuine no-brainer move of having Obsidian develop a new Fallout game, which is way less of a brainer than Shadowrun.
Activision. Zero RPG experience from any current Activision studio. Don't see that happening.
Blizzard. The idea of Blizzard making any non-GaaS game seems a little far-fetched. The last non-remake GaaS game actually released by Blizzard was what, 2010 with Starcraft 2? And before that WC3 in 2002. Now does Blizzard have the skills? Absolutely yes. They have fantastic game designers, fantastic (if somewhat misused, imho) artists, serviceable writers (hey they're better than they were!). Sure. But you'd need to basically pull people off multiple other games to work on this, and why would Blizzard do that when they could make yet another GaaS?
