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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45534
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Yes, you should absolutely care about the story, and the gameplay as well, because those are what will keep people actually comming back.

Art (and music) should _always_ be secondary to making the gameplay good, and the story as well, even if you are using art as the premise of the game or as part of the gimmick. Even in waifu games, the art is there to draw the player in initially, and add some extra reward to help keep the engaged in the actual game.

Looking at this from a simpler angle, if the player is only there for the barely SFW art of attractive girls (or guys, or animals, or robots, or whatever else the target audience is interested in), then why play the game? Why not just look at screenshots of the game? If you want to create more than just an irritatingly complex photo gallery of your art, you need to have something beyond that to keep the player wanting to actually play the game, and a good story is the second most reliable way to do that (gambling via micro-transactions is the most reliable, but that's risky legal waters in some parts of the world).

Think about what thoughtful reviewers actually mention liking about 'normal' games (RPG's, MMO's, even FPS or RTS games). While art and/or music is often on the list, it's almost always icing on the cake. Nobody sane is playing Dead Space, or Destiny, or Borderlands, or GTA, or even stuff like Mario or Sonic games for the art, they are popular games because they either have engaging gameplay, a good story, or both.

Taking this story focus to the extreme, I would encourage you to look at why Ōkami is as highly acclaimed of a game as it is. On the surface, much of the appeal is the sumi-e art style, and part of the game mechanics even directly involve art (you literally paint your best attacks, and also use the same mechanic to interact with much of the world). Despite that though, what really pulls people in consistently isn't the art, it's the fact that it's a good story that's uniquely different in numerous ways from your run-of-the-mill RPG, combined with that unique (and good) art and 'unconventional' (not really, it's just that every other game that did this kind of thing was either a flop or only a cult-classic) game-play gimmick that makes it as good of a game as it is.

You can also easily find examples of games that were lacking in some way despite good art that did horribly. Generation Zero is going through this right now, the art is amazing, and the story is decent (not amazing, but not really bad either), but the gameplay has issues, and the game itself is buggy as hell, so a lot of the people they drew in with that amazing art don't play it anymore, or only play it rarely (or are not playing it until it gets fixed).

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Where this gets interesting though is when you are trying to focus solely on something everyone else is already doing very well. You do, of course, need to cover that aspect, but if that's your only draw, then there's no reason for people to even try your game, because your competitors are just as good. Looking again at Ōkami, the art-style didn't make the game amazing or keep people playing, but it _did_ draw people in to what was otherwise a mostly standard RPG with only a few gimmicky unique aspects to it by making the game look different in a big way. You'll have to find a similar balance yourself whereby you can actually draw people in with your advertising (mostly art in this case of course) but then _retain_ players through other means (ideally other than gambling, because that brings all kinds of potential legal troubles). That player retention is actually more important for getting new players than the initial pitch, the truly successful games out there consistently get more new players because of referrals from happy players who like the game than they ever will from their own advertising.

Original score: 3