Unpopular Opinion
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Vote the opposite of the norm.
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Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
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Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
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4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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None of these are indie games. While the teams were a lot smaller than modern AAA, they weren't one or two people making a game in their spare time the way many indie games get made.
Pixel art games are popular for reasons including being much easier for solo devs or small teams to create. It cuts out a ton of work like rigging models, in many cases dealing with physics, complex lighting, and all sorts of those things. Depends on the game of course, but in many cases a lot of that stuff is either a non-isssue or way simplified. All art assets can have a unified look and quality without taking forever to make.
Games can also be lightweight on needed specs to run. Again helpful for solo devs or small teams which might not be optimization experts, and it means much less of having to figure out how to help people having issues on all sorts of hardware combos.
Pixel art can be easily readable on small screens pretty easily, which is good for things like playing on a Steamdeck. Again, plenty of non-pixelart games are readable on screens, but it is certainly easy to do it in that style.
This isn't to say non-pixel art indie games don't exist. There's tons and tons of them. I'm pretty sure something like 50 trillion indie games are released on Steam every picosecond. There's plenty that do the late 90s-early 2000s aesthetic. Or you can just play old games on Steam, especially ones that have gotten official or unofficial quality of life improvements since their release.
That's a bit fuzzy. Half-Life had a budget of around $1M back in 1998 under its original publisher Sierra On-Line. It had to be saved by Gabe Newell, who went out of pocket to keep it afloat.
This, compared to peer AAA titles like FF7 ($145M), Shenmu ($47M), and Wing Commander 4 ($12M) made it significantly underweight. Even Game Freak's break out title "Pokemon" is estimated to cost north of $10M. As Sierra On-line was a historically famous publisher on the brink of bankruptcy, it's debatable whether their dying gasp constitutes a "legit" indie title or not.
But whatever you can say about the original, the sandbox of second-tier mod games that it spawned - Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Day of Defeat, Natural Selection - certainly qualify.
OK but would it have killed Balatro devs use vector graphics like many modern card games on Linux? The game doesn't have any animated protagonist traversing the world.
Isn't there a happy medium between pixeleted art and highly detailed animation? Hades doesn't have graphical fidelity (?) of AAA games like Assassin's Creed but it's still pleasing to look at. Or look at mobile game like Monument Valley or Hitman Go.
Balatro is, as far as I know, a single person dev team and this is their first game as far as I know.
Hades was made by an established studio that has been around for 17 years and has 25 employees.
Again, a lot of people pick pixel art because they can make all the assets look unified relatively easily. If you've ever come across a game with lots of storebought assets made by different artists you'll know how jarring it is to have wildly inconsistent assets.
They could pick something else, but if it has an extra layer of complexity to getting the assets looking right and unified they may choose not to. You might think "Oh how much art can there be." and the answer for a solo dev is "Oh no too much." especially when they are also designing and programming.
And if you don't care for pixel art there's tons and tons and tons of games without it, so you can go play them instead without it affecting you.
Why should they change their art style just for you? This is nothing more than a you problem.