Following up on this from yesterday. This doesn't mean game world history has no value. It's that much of game world history is non-interactable. Which is fine for things that are passively consumed.
Games, though, are a medium distinguished by their interactability and the function of those choices. Which is why supplementary material is often best used to provide context for choices.
Years ago, on my run at the helm of VTM, we published between 7-10 books each year. We had trained buyers to regard them as periodicals and updates more than supplementary material. (Somewhat inherent to leading with metaplot.)
Those books often had big history sections, ~10-20K words each. But we were making books for buyers who often weren't playing the material, they were consuming it like popular culture like novels, comics, TV, etc.
Now, many of those consumers' habits have shifted into streaming, Actual Play, podcasts, etc. So the passively consumable content still exists, but the current practices of the hobby have shifted that away from game publisher to streamer, etc.
This means now games get to focus more on being games, which is to say engines of choice.
There's also a ton of peripheral stuff you can buy, often from the same publisher, to augment games. This scratches some of the participatory itch as big fat history chapters. And many are also designed with greater functionality (theme dice, screens, etc.)
(Of course, this isn't gospel, and the artifact of the game itself is the subject of design, much like the game rules and setting. Many games opt to treat their history as "found footage" or other montage-style presentation, to feel more experiential.)
