[Manco]

I'm not just talking about retro style either. Games with shitty graphics get defended blindly because "GRAPHICS DON MATTER IT GAMEPLAY MAEK GUD GAME". No. Fuck you, you piece of hipster trash. Imscared is not a good game just because it has shitty graphics. It wouldn't even be a good game if it had better graphics, but it would be more tolerable, that's for sure.

While I agree that bad art shouldn’t be ignored just because gameplay is good, there is a possible flip side to the argument: developers who lack aesthetic skill but want to create games. Should we be deterring people from creating games just because they cannot produce a specific aspect of the experience to an expected standard?

I also can’t help but notice you focus in this instance specifically on people defending the game, not the developers creating the game. If people enjoy a game in spite of the graphics that is entirely their right to – it’s not up to you to tell them to have a lesser experience any more than they can tell you to ignore the parts you disliked.

People seem to forget that videogames are still primarily a visual medium.

I was just gonna reply with “technically it’s primarily an interactive medium”, but that got me thinking about the possibilities of games based purely on non-visual cues. I could see a game based entirely on audio, for example, although it would be tougher to sell to a wide audience.

This is dumb. You can have a low budget and still not look like complete shit. You can make a good looking game with zero budget, it all depends on whether you're prepared to put the effort in or not.

I’ll tell you what’s dumb: equating the marketing of a game by focusing on positive traits as lying. That’s my specific problem with what Varrok said so please don’t try to interpret that as me defending bad art decisions in games.

Making games is not like making films, there are numerous free softwares about that, if you learn how to use them, you can use to create fantastic looking and fantastic playing games. If you don't know how to use them, it's not like you have to pay to learn, either. The internet is literally all of mankind's knowledge at your fingertips.

There are numerous things wrong with this statement:

1. Filmmakers also use software nowadays – in fact there are even movies made entirely with CG, just like games! And just like games, a movie isn't made arbitrarily better or worse by how well its makers know the software.
2. Intimate knowledge and ability to use software does not automatically make one capable of creating “fantastic looking and fantastic playing games”. It’s entirely possible for someone to have vast technical knowledge and zero creative skill.
3. Being able to find free tutorials and knowledgebases for software does not necessarily make one better at using them. Game development in particular is complicated as shit, and while good reference material will lower the barrier for entry it isn’t going to stop plenty of people simply finding it too hard, too stressful or too time-consuming.