Im a writer and concept person... Dabbled in graphics...  But developers please have a story outline before the game. So many games die because of retro active story line work. When a game takes off... The sequel is painted in a corner by story constraints... When you break the story it trashes the time line. Writing is completely undervalued. Take George Lucas... He basically made the Star wars Wiki over a year... And was able to make a viable universe because all the pieces where on the table, he saved pieces for later.. And made sure total victory never happened... Bad for business...

Im intrested in syfy space and knight age eras.. My type of abilities are best in strategy based games... I conceptualize things with story but roughing things out in minecraft to run through ideas. I have some awesome species ideas. Make them realistic, but make them unique and fun.

Ha ha red alert 4... The westwood section of Ea is pretty much dead. Large part story... But not keeping games modern in terms of gameplay.   Obviously many super simple games story doesn't matter.. But them games have an experation date.

Ea is a great example of story destruction... And by dieing.. Means the sequel change dies... And sales drop off...

There are degrees of story collapse... But has an effect... Star trek and star wars is a great example... Star trek dumped on its history, star wars clings to it... While movies and shows... It heavily influences the game, and the support base... You see this comparing movies and subsequent games from them movies and shows.

Whats a smart idea is from a marketing back ground. Have a few 10 to 20 minute shows based off the game universe. Use it to get pre game hype, you can use it to foreshadow future developments and put them in context.

Bad story effects games. Many dont go deep enough obviously. On the other side skyrim is near the gold standard, no one sees that franchise dieing any decade soon.

In my opinion, as generations pass very few pay attention to the intricate details of a story or background. They just want to jump to the action or the kill as it were.

I posit that don't necessarily need a fleshed-out story to go with their game but should figure out early on how integral said story will be.  A prime, recent example of a successful game with little to no story is Mario Odyssey.  Framing devices aside, the thread that binds gameplay across all the levels isn't a story with an arc but is instead the objective, "collect all the moons."
Mechanically, stories in games can serve to inform the player of the current gameplay parameters, as well as providing a rhythm/structure to the events in the game, but the more that the story gets in the way of the gameplay, the less merit the game has as a game.