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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

to me pixel art revival ticks a few boxes:

- it's toyish, games got an adult tag since ps2/ps3 but to me games are games.

- it's abstract, the run for photorealism can jump over the shark too. I like to play with representations and not absolute recreation of a thing. When playing honestly, I don't even have the time to enjoy the specular reflections or whatever BDR shader you cooked. It's mostly impressive on still images.

- it makes people seek other ways to surprise you instead of relying on the usual ultra capable 3d engines that often do the same thing but different skins.

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It's also convenient for low budget indie game devs. Pixel art is cheap to produce and 2d games are much easier to develop.

FWIW, not all pixel art is equal (and that's okay!). For some, pixel art is a means to an end—cheaper/easier to produce, focus on other aspects of game quality or time to release. For others it's very much a labor of love with plenty of time and effort dedicated to quality art.

Quality pixelart is more expensive than 3D assets. You get all angles and bone based animation from a model while you have to draw every animation frame in every angle manually with 2D approach. On top of that a 3D world brings easier customisation and reusability of assets.

OTOH with 3D you have to do a lot of work setting up bones, textures, blend shapes, and whatnot.

Is quality pixel art more expensive than quality 3D assets? I really don't think so.

Poor quality 3D assets still work OK. Poor quality pixel art is very ugly. So if you can only afford poor quality, 3D is much better.

shallow theory:

- 3d art is technically harder (more layers to master to get to a result). Pixel art operations are indeed trivial and accessible without learning.

- good visual / animated / gaming art is hard no matter 1d, 2d or 3d. It's more an art than a technique.

1d gaming art is almost certainly the hardest

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