Gamers are the ones to blame, as they have voted with their wallets. Latest Deus Ex sold poorly, Dishonored 2 did poorly, latest Hitman didn't do too well and it looks like Prey will be no exception. Industry is reacting to market, and market obviously isn't interested in systemic SP games. Multiplayer and co-op games are selling (not to mention that they are cheaper to make and that it is easier to milk them with new content), Pavlovian open worlds are selling, cinematic shoters/adventures are selling. Customers had their chance to change that, had a bunch of them after Dishonored and Human Revolution actually, and each of them was wasted.
It's kind of weird. In many ways, Bethesda's open world RPGs are more complex than Arkane's games. They've got stats. They've got inventories. They've got dialogue trees. They've got big open worlds that you need to navigate, with lots of downtime.
Immersive sims are more similar to classic crowd-pleasing shooters than Bethesda's games are. They should be
more accessible. Yet they're failing to break through. WTF is going on?
It's very simple: you have to understand the POV of a console peasant who discovered western RPGs with Fallout 3.
Fallout 3 is a FPS/RPG hybrid with: a big open world, character creation, lots of stats, choice and consequence, "play it your own way" thing, etc. For the consolefag it's not a FPS/RPG hybrid, it's a RPG period, because he doesn't know better. He doesn't see this hybridation as something new or fresh as we did when the first Deus Ex came out, for example.
Now take your typical "immersive sim" (nuDeus Ex, Dishonored, etc): it's also a "RPG" (for the peasants eyes), like Fallout 3, but... it misses a lot of things (no character creation, less stats), it has a narrower scope (no open world, not so much "play it your own way" or dialogue options).
So... why the fuck a consolefag would want to play this? It's inferior in every way! (don't ask him to value things like "level design", LOL)
So yeah, they perform poorly. And in addition to that there are the guys like me that are the main target of this games but who don't buy them too because they are casual consolised shit and because I already played this games a million times, they bring nothing new and still use old cancerous designs like fucking quicksaves.