Passable art is common. Original and interesting game mechanics are exceedingly rare, and will continue to be. The relationship between passable art and throwaway games is like that between bland AI content and marketing blogs.
Really good games will still employ really good artists.
This is my point exactly, but even passable art takes some time to create. I’m not excited for the very-soon-to-arrive tide of VNs, deckbuilders, and JRPGs made with effectively 0 time or effort.
I’ve never understood the effort = quality view of art. Just because someone spent thousands of hours does not mean it is good art. And plenty of great art is executed quickly.
It seems as odd to me as bemoaning the way word processors let people write novels without even being good typists.
Picasso produced 50,000 paintings in his career[1], about two per day every day. So probably considerably more on some days.
It’s harder to find data on great art from relative novices. But consider the opposite — how much bad art is there from people who put their 10,000 hours or whatever in? I’m willing to believe some correlation between time spent and quality, but I am not willing to believe that tools that make artists more efficient necessarily reduce quality.
I mean, part of my job is hiring illustrators and designers. I can tell by looking at a portfolio whether someone has put in their (slightly metaphorical) "10,000 hours". And much of that has nothing to do with execution or the tools they used. In fact, thinking that execution and tooling make them better is often a red flag.
What I look for is that the artist knows what they want and that the ideas they're putting on the page are thoughtful, coherent, original, and well-executed in a style that's unique enough to justify hiring them personally. And the ability to hone ideas into visual form is not innate, nor have I ever seen it successfully done by someone who didn't spend countless hours trying and failing first.
For example, upper management, who spend time looking at and approving art pieces, almost never understand that altering them is going to make them worse. "Add something here" or "take this out", generally undermine the piece when coming from someone not trained and experienced. Writing prompts is much the same as being a manager. You never get exactly the result you expect for what you asked, but that is also because you did not have the exact vision in your own mind of how it would look before it was executed.
Practice is about developing that vision. Once you have that vision, execution is the easy part, and you don't really need a tool to draw it for you. In any case, the tool will not draw it the way you see it.
So yes, a songwriter who's written tons of songs can suddenly write a good one in 30 minutes. Most of my best songs were written longhand with no edits. That happens sometimes after writing hundreds of songs that you throw away.
Similarly, I've been coding for 25 years. Putting my fingers on the keys and typing out code is the easy part. I don't need copilot to do that for me. I don't really need a fancy IDE. What practice gives is the ability to see the best way to do something and how it fits into a larger project.
If a tool could read the artist's mind and draw exactly what the artist sees, it would be crystal clear that 10,000 hours of trial and error in image-making results in a thought process that makes great art possible (if the artist is capable of it at all). The effort is mostly in the process of developing that mental skill set.
But this is a category that didn't exist yet. So who knows what people without art skills or budgets might do? Probably nothing, but maybe one in ten thousand actually isn't garbage. Just like music at the advent of digital home recording. The market is already so flooded it hardly matters.
I'm an artist and a gentleman coder and I'm disgusted and offended by careless work. But I don't think I need to die on the hill of stopping infinite crappy game mills from having access to infinite crappy art.
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I'm also just bitter after years working on pretty great original art / mechanics driven casual games that only garnered tiny devoted fan bases, and so I assume that when it comes to the kinds of long tail copycat games you're talking about, especially with AI art, no one's going to bother playing them anyway.
Really good games will still employ really good artists.