| I don't think people are missing the point. There's 2 aspects to this: style (retro) and execution (the actual graphics). Gamers generally like the style. The Venn diagram of his target audience and people who like retro game visuals is likely near a perfect circle. What makes the games look unpleasing is the execution. It's just all over the place, to the point where it looks like a mashup of free assets collected from various websites. People are pointing out that his otherwise amazing games are being held back by their subpar graphics. Unfortunately, instead of taking the criticism fairly, he sets up a strawman to deflect any blame, claiming that anyone who doesn't like the execution just dislikes the style. There's multiple points in the article where this shows, for example this one: >The key problem here is that, when most people say, "Your art looks bad," what they mean is, "I want art that is good." They mean, "I want AAA-quality art." Big jumps there Jeff. He shows his lack of knowledge about making good art when he says he can't afford the extra man power to solve the issue. No one here would claim that, to fix bad code, you have to hire more programmers. Art works in the same way. The problems are foundational and don't require more employees or more hours to get right - just a better approach. The argument that this is not possible with freelancers is silly. He gives the example of a freelancer creating a super niche style that no other artist can replicate. No one is asking him to create award-winning art. People are simply asking for games that are not-ugly. There's plenty of artstyles that fit all his requirements, while still being not-ugly and reproducible by other artists. I don't doubt that it's hard to find good artists when you never took the time to study what makes good art. The truth seems to be that after his 25 years of game development Jeff still doesn't know how to make good looking games. He has every right to do as he wants - just as anyone else is free to comment on the look of games. But this article is nothing more than one big list of poor justifications, which is why it's getting a lot of flak. |
Either by hiring someone to do it for you, obviosuly adding man hours, or by changing your own skill set and the distribution of your focus which either takes time outright (which translates to man hours, as you learn new skills) or changes the distribution of hours, taking effort away from other areas of the game, such as writing.