Is pixelling as art dead in games?

[Helm]

Nobody would do a huge piece and apply pixel techniques to every little bit. It's just insanity. But even if they did, in the eyes of the public that'd just be CG, just good insane-detail CG. Is that what you hope pixel art will be in the arty crowd? If you can't see the pixel, you're misrepresenting Pixel Art.

[Souly]

My friends believe that pixel art is unintresting.
They don't like to see the pixels, they don't see the beauty from something made with limited colors where I do.
This is probably because I'm a pixel artist.

Today the demand in games is for 3D animation.
The average person now a days does not find pixel art attractive.
They play games just for the graphics.
I have had chats with MANY of gamers and they base games on the graphics not the originality or the game-play.

[Xion]

I have had chats with MANY of gamers and they base games on the graphics not the originality or the game-play.

They're not real gamers.

[AdamTierney]

Nobody would do a huge piece and apply pixel techniques to every little bit. It's just insanity. But even if they did, in the eyes of the public that'd just be CG, just good insane-detail CG. Is that what you hope pixel art will be in the arty crowd? If you can't see the pixel, you're misrepresenting Pixel Art.

I've seen pixel pieces that are just that - massive pieces using an ungodly amout of colors, but with the same technique and self-restriction as our works. I've even seen them posted here occasionally. But as amazed as we are when we click them and see all that careful dithering, no one else cares. It might as well be a jpeg to Average Joe.

[pkmays]

Which is why the average Joe's opinion should mean about [] that much to a pixel artist. It's like showing up at a Harley Davidson convention and trying to show off your Kawasaki Ninja.

[Ai]

whos to say the pixels have to be big? even if people started making pieces the size of cg paintings( impractical yes, but so is doing an oil paintting with painter or photoshop etc on your comp) the underlying foundation will still remain merely because of the fact that the image was manipulated at the smallest screen element.

I must comment that doing such a thing, thinking in that way, would just be mental masturbation. The significance of 'pixel art' at the least depends on the significance of each pixel; necessarily the more pixels in the picture, the less pixel-artish it is, and the more colors in the picture, the less pixel-artish it is.
Don't you feel that your artistic endeavours should achieve something? Filling a huge hole with a teaspoon is more masochistic than artistic.

I do feel that there is room for some middle ground. something that is CG-scaled while sharing aesthetics and stylisms with pixel art (such as restricted colors, custom dithering, fine color control, reasonable precision, shading quirks, clean AA)*. I spend a fair amount of my free time working on technology for this, and my art is targeted toward it. In my assessment, that's as close as you're likely to get to truly large pixel art.

*maybe someone would say, 'that's Oekaki'. Oekaki is sort of a bastardization of both. the only 'mixed' technique is (non-custom) dithering. What I mean would be sort of like doing a CG designed expressly for pixel-art, so that in it's final throes it would seem pixelartish near everywhere, and only considering the piece as a whole would testify to its hybrid nature.

[Ryumaru]

woah woah woah, apparently yall got the idea that the pieces that i  talk about shouldnt have those things such as pallette conversation, and proper pixel tech. without those, it would of course lose the pixel art value.

[Dusty]

In the gaming world, even if the game is good, the first selling point is going to be the graphics. Sure, there are the gamers that appreciate the gameplay first and the graphics later, but those games hardly ever get the widespread talk they need to get to make themselves known. It's always the flashy, good looking, eyecandy games that get all the attention. And sadly, pixel art isn't considered "flashy eyecandy" to the majority of gamers. They can't look at pixel art as we do here and appreciate the style, limitations, the technique it takes to work with pixel art. I think that pixel art is dying, at least in the gaming world, because the only reason people did dealt with it, is because it was all they had. Now that it seems 3d is taking over most of the gaming mediums, there is no need for 2d.

[Helm]

I've seen pixel pieces that are just that - massive pieces using an ungodly amout of colors, but with the same technique and self-restriction as our works. I've even seen them posted here occasionally. But as amazed as we are when we click them and see all that careful dithering, no one else cares. It might as well be a jpeg to Average Joe.

Actually outside of the demoscene - and boy, do they stretch what would be considered pixel-level detail to the limit - I haven't seen any such piece posted, really. I haven't seen 640x plus pixel sized pieces, finished, detailed ALL-OVER with the same skill and attention as smaller pieces. Care to post links?