Comment by jcranmer
Speaking of older games that never had a successor that quite managed to capture what they did well, there's also SimTower, where the main successors are Yoot Tower (which never really made it out of Japan) and Project Highrise, which just doesn't scratch the same itch.
There were not a lot of published games, but I seem to remember there being a handful of flash game derivatives. I played the heck out of Corporation Inc on Armorgames back in the day.