every single featured game is pixel art for some reason, people can make their games however they want but i just wish there was more variety, sorry if what i say comes off as rude towards the artists

I get it, Not only are most of the featured games on Newgrounds pixel art, but that also applies to like 99% of modern 2D indie games. There are only a handful of games that don't have a pixel art style, such as Castle Crashers, Cuphead, Hollow Night, Cult of the Lamb, etc.

Pixel art is more approachable for more artists, and bad pixel art looks better than bad non-pixel art to the average person. Vector art is less approachable than in the past due to a lack of good and affordable tools for it. Aseprite costs $20. Not every artist can animate. Good artists are probably in the art portal and not suffering to make a game. Good animators are more focused on getting/staying employed.

As a new game dev I chose pixel art because it's much more easier to animate compared to my regular art. I also chose it because of the genre (arcade game) and because I want to get better at pixel art. I do wanna make game with my regular art someday but not as my first game.

pixel art is MUCH easier to work with for animating, personally as a 2d hi-res artist and pixel sprite artist I kind of despise making full 2d hi res animations

It's a lot easier to make a 2D game than 3D, that and a lot of games work fine with a pixel art style. I think there's plenty of indie games not doing pixel art people can enjoy compared to before and the idea that too many of them use pixel art is kind of just not true anymore.

i really dont know maybe to keep the old days vibe

Probably cause it's more easier

I'd say a lot of retro/pixel art games comes from a nostalgia for a time of innovative and memorable games, what is often remembered as "the good games".

But that's the thing with memory. It tends to do a sort of survivorship bias. There was lots of shit games back then too, we just remember the best ones that stood out. There are great games being made now as well, but they tend not to be very popular, often overshadowed by boring AAA games that takes the spotlight in the games marked.

It's easy, it's lightweight, you're less likely to experience style drift as you continue development, people are nostalgic for it, and if you're a bad artist, you can more convincingly hide behind the limitations of the medium to explain choppy animations and minimalist graphics. It's the optimal beginner's style.

Because Pixel art is better.

That's WHY!

Long answer: Seeing as every AAA game is trying to outdo the other with 'hyperrealistic graphics' that end up taking center stage while the rest of the game is underdeveloped and buggy, I think the push to pixel art in general isn't bad per say.

I do agree that variety is important, especially on Newgrounds, but I can easily see why pixel art may be appealing to game devs for MULTIPLE reasons. Not only looking appealing, but also being simpler to work with both in terms of animation and also tile space. Plus it tends to age better 5-10 years down the line. The pixel art style never really bothered me too much, if anything I welcome it considering the 'mainstream' space is also highly repetitive with the same Unreal Engine look. It'll be cool to see more games with a 'hand drawn' look though.

Short answer: Its cool

(Also I dont think its rude, I completely get where you're coming from overall)

It's less labor intensive and offers a certain nostalgia bonus, especially for devs who aren't animators. Players are more likely to tolerate limited animation when it happens on pixel sprites. For highres 2D and 3D art the expectations are higher - you automatically expect nice, fluid movement instead of 4-frame walkcycles.

It's the current trend of indie game graphics. AAA games do the hyper-realistic stuff while the indie game devs do the pixel art stuff. There's quite a lot of games that don't have pixel art, but it just seems to be the current trend as hyper-realism's gotten boring over the years and for a long time, pixel art was seen as lower quality as in the late 90s and 2000s, the only consoles that ran pixel art games were the handhelds like the gameboy, that were lower power and couldn't run fancy 3D graphics (the PSP is the exception). Back then it was about 3D and trying to look as realistic as possible with millions and millions of polygons. It's a similar reason as to why low poly 3D games are coming back now.

man, this is newgrounds. people's personal projects usually don't have all the time and staff to build 3D modeled games. pixel art is cheap and low-labor.

Easier to work with and get away with mistakes. Higher resolutions will expose mistakes like proportions, perspective and style consistency. Animating higher resolutions generally requires more frames as well to look good, in my experience at least. Not to say that making pixel art is easy, but the barrier to entry for non-artists is much lower.

As a game dev, pixelart is just much, MUCH easier to make and faster to make look decent. Thats it really. Its just easier and more accessible since all you need is a working mouse and some pixel editor, which there are tons of, even free ones.

In my case, I can't draw worth a sack of wet mice and I have an amazing pixel artist helping me. 🐀👍

This is a salty opinion, but;

EDITED I just remembered many other situations similar to this thread, so...

I have no idea why they do that, me and a bunch of other people are using this horrific game design app with pixel art as the default thing. But we've tried some crazy stuff to make it look different, it's strange that people with access to more will not do something unique for their games' style. I hope we see something besides photo realistic and/or pixel art soon.. Stylized art stands out and is eternal

1. 3/12 games on the front page have pixel-art graphics style. 25% is not enough to make the "every single game" hyperbole. I know it's been a month since this was posted, but I remember reading it back then and observing similar proportions.

2. pixel-art is fun, crisp, minimizes development headache, and looks cool

3. minimalism and certain limitations force developers and artists to be creative and spend most of their energy on the GAMEPLAY elements...simplicity is good. That's a major reason why I think 90s and early 00s games have the most soul...admittingly I'm being a tad nostalgic

probably because they feel like giving the game a 80's or 90's vibe

I guess it's because pixel art is instantly recognizable as "video game art", and makes the games portal stand out from the movies and art portals.

Pixel art is and always will be associated with video games, so I don't think think it will ever go out of style.

Although pixel art is still the most popular, I do appreciate the trend of games using other "retro" styles like low-poly and ASCII art as well!

It's really quite simple. People are nostalgic for the old days of video games, obviously, but I think the thing a lot of people forget is that pixel art is, comparatively, pretty easy to learn compared to traditional illustration. It's a very systematic and precise art form that tends to appeal to lizard-brained coder/game dev types like myself. Additionally, since it's basically a form of impressionism where the viewer fills in the details implied by the gestural form of the image, the finer details can be omitted, saving dev time. Pixel assets are usually very small in file size and are usually made in nice, tidy resolutions, making them easy to implement in-engine. Pixel games are almost always 2D which means new devs won't have to deal with the myriad of new issues and required skills 3D games create like modeling, lighting, texturing, rigging, etc.

In short, pixel art is just accessible.

Speaking as somebody whose currently has a game with a pixelart aesthetic frontpaged, I personally think it comes down to the ability to make bigger changes incredibly quickly. Unlike with bigger vector art, you can make small changes to pixelart without needing to redo entire spritesheets: something that I often find myself doing with game assets as development goes on and we want to make things more visually clear to the player.

actually that’s easier to draw all sprites, also pixelated games work faster most of times (actually depends on how to render) but nowadays it’s not so actual problem