It's interesting that so many replies here point out John Romero. I wonder if it's a generational thing -- people old enough to remember the hype of Ion Storm, but not quite old enough to remember the period before that.

No, it wasn't John Romero's fault. Nor was it any single person or company; but it would be more accurate to say that Atari and Electronic Arts are responsible.

Atari didn't like to give credit to creators. Atari eventually blew itself up, but a lot of people remembered how wronged they felt by the company withholding credit.

Some of these people created, or were early hires, at Electronic Arts. Although EA was venture-funded, it was very idealistic in its early days. The "Arts" in the name was proposed initially as "Artists", but the company felt that naming itself in that way would suggest that the people running the company were the artists, thus stealing credits from the developers. So instead, they called the company "Arts" and promoted their developers as "artists". EA also experimented with a lot of artistic choices, like promoting developers in press tours, trying to innovate in their packaging, credit screens, etc.

Tl;dr: all of this stuff basically failed to impress the public and couldn't be correlated to any improvement in sales. People apparently just didn't care. The one success EA eventually had with name branding was Madden football... but John Madden was an aging football coach who barely knew where the "On" button was. Later Electronic Arts CEOs thus trashcanned the idea of promoting developers, although I believe the founder, Trip Hawkins, also spoke quite publicly about the idea as a failure. EA became the festering mudpit of middle management we all know it as today. That all happened by the late 1980s.

Id Software, the place that gave John Romero his rockstar image, came after all of that, founded in 1991. Ion Storm was founded in 1996. At the same time that Romero's reputation was tracing a parabolic arc, people like Sid Meier were showing that you actually could use a developers name successfully. Romero didn't scare away anyone from doing so. Rather, it was the experience of corporations trying to do the same that scared away other corporations, and Ion Storm's failure (having been funded by Eidos, I believe) was just one more bit of evidence on a pre-existing pile.

Is that evidence right? It seems to generally be true, in my opinion. Yes, you get the occasional extremely successful auteur like Meier or Kojima. But those aren't predictable or repeatable, and you also get people like Romero, or Will Wright, or Peter Molyneux, who hit a peak then completely bomb with insane or just flat out wrong decision making.

One of the other comments suggested that one more reason is the lack of a union for movie producers. I have my own pet theory, which is rather different:

Making games is much, much harder than making movies. Success is less repeatable, and we have far more people who hit a peak in one project then utterly fail in the next. I think a good piece of evidence for this is in who the successful auteurs are in gaming: they're people who make the same kinds of experiences over and over. Sid Meier not only built his brand on sequels of Civilization; he's also a bit of a management genius who found the right bright young minds to lead design on his sequels. Hideo Kojima, in the Metal Gear series, basically wrote an extremely long story punctuated by gameplay. Will Wright was actually successful for a long time with fairly similar simulation games, and only met his end as a popular designer when he bit off way more than he could chew with Spore. The more a producer or designer tries to innovate on subsequent projects, the more likely they are to fail -- and gaming is a far more innovation-driven industry than film.

The only outlier I can even think of, someone who makes vastly different games and succeeds almost all the time, is Shigeru Miyamoto. He's got the whole support structure of Nintendo behind him, which is really proof that maybe the original EA model could have worked; but Nintendo is, thus far, a unique existence that nobody else has replicated, and even haven't figured out how to churn out name-brand creators.