Right, sure that's an important distinction. I shouldn't really talk to the motivations of oil painting masters because I'm not one of them, anyway, on a more constructive note, here's why I still engage with pixel art although most of the principles of good art seem to me to be translatable in other media and/or methods of making pictures:

Clusters. It's very beautiful for me to make something harmonious out of interlocking squares where you have a good sense of 'atom' count, distances become clearer, bigger/smaller shape contrasts are more apparent than in a higher resolution medium.

On a secondary level, there is a traditional, archival quality to pixel art in gaming and whomever wants to make a pixel art game with an appreciation to it knows where they're trying to slot it, historically. Retro games reference eras, new-school purposefully is iconoclaustic and so on.

Talking to Auro in particular, game looks like this:



To me immediately there's four problems:

1. It looks like a typical Amiga-era incomprehensible UI, but the game looks Japanese-cute. Historically this is a mish-mash that I don't understand, which wouldn't be a problem on its own if

2. This looks like a hexy tactics game and it has no Final Fantasy Tactics/Ogre Battle isometric miniature world to marvel at. I'm not great at tactics games and I still gravitated towards them and wanted to play them to look at the little iso arenas, and pixel art *is the medium for iso cuteness* and the designer decided to opt for generic hexes that look so featureless they could just as well be vectors/hd art with sprites on top.

3 That makes it look like the game is mish-mashing pixel assets on top of non pixel-terrain. 

4. Clusters : the spites scream pixel art but the technique is not clean and bold, it doesn't look to me like a game that wants to be made of pixels and has thought about what to do with its pixelly self. Pixel art games that actually are seeing success (even casual ones) usually have an apparent identity at one glance (think of perhaps Sword and Sworcery). A constructive way to move forward with pixel art for this studio would be to actually *do more advanced pixel art*.

@Helm: Do you mean that you look to influence and inspire people in a profound manner? In other words, are you talking about art that carries a certain depth and touches people more deeply than, say, a bunch of 16x16 pixel RPG icons? Or is private kindness just an arbitrary metric you've set for yourself, without any consideration in regards to whether the art is profound or banale? I don't mean to sound critical, I'm just not sure I understand you correctly.

I mean with something more than 16x16 rpg sprites, but perhaps even a huge lot of 16x16 sprites, arranged in a certain manner can be inspiring as well (they call them video - games I think). It's just about doing what you're doing long enough, getting to the core of what it means and trying to communicate it that will get to people I think, aside from subject matter.

Personally my internal metric of achievement is not whether people seem to like my artwork but whether I believe I have put out something in the culture that has inspired people or helped them. The distinction seems thin but the way to verify it is to not count gestures like 'upvotes' and 'likes' but instead personal correspondence from strangers that tell you they've been positively impacted by something you've done in a significant way. Every few years I check my life with this metric to see if I'm on a good road, but I don't say that it's a number that always has to increase, just that it has to be at least there. If I've not made anything useful in such a fashion for a long time, then there's something going wrong.

I hop from writing to music to visual arts randomly, but the way I check whether I'm making a positive impact on the outside world is still the same: The private kindness of strangers.

All that said, I don't think there's any merit to try to advise anybody that they should try to be 'more like this' and not like how they are, as I didn't make any conscious choice to be wired this way.

Brings tears to my eyes. Literally.

See, you put me in a group there with other artists whose work - although I respect it - I find their choice of colors is tacky, just a bit random, or it was at least, in the past (artists grow). I don't want to speak ill of fellow artists, it's just to say that this is *exactly* what I want to move away from, if this is how it's percieved from people on the outside, to be part of that group of people who use huge jumps in hue to see if they can make them work. We can. We've done it for 10 years. Proper artists have been doing it for god knows how many decades. So what's next? Some cohesion, perhaps? A symbolic language of color? Something more involved than putting the green from the shoes as a buffer in the skin.

It's this preciousness about control & maximization of utility of every SINGULAR thing that drives pixel artists into making choices that holistically aren't attractive to me - but it just might only be me, so