Coincidentally, this point of view is probably wht this is one of the best things I heard from brian eno:

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

Hot take - everyone is hitting on nostalgia, but personally I think there's more to it than just that.

Low-res games invite the player to use their imagination, something that gets lost in the pursuit of hyper-realism.

Unlike most modern AAA games, games like Stardew Valley, Minecraft, or BOTW/TOTK invite the player to use their creativity - not just in problem solving, but also in how they view the world.

This was just an inherent feature of older games, due to the limitations of technology, but now it's a luxury in a world that's increasingly trying to script or control how you think and interact at every turn.

So, beyond nostalgia as a driving factor, and don't get me wrong, it is a major one...

The other big factor is affordability of both game development and game uh, consumption, gameplay.

Yep, sure, you can develop games the AAA way with absurd levels of staff, funding, (mis)management, get those movie grade graphics on your $3000 Nvidia fucking whatever.

But less and less people can actually afford that level of hardware, the game's price, will put up with its broken buggy bullshit and MTX.

If you're an indie dev (team)?

Its way, way, waaay more easy and affordable to make a graphically simpler game, that is either highly stylized, intentionally emulates an old retro style, or even aims for graphical realism, but just does so to the standards of roughly a decade ago.

Good enough is in fact good enough for a huge supermajority of people, in terms of graphics.

Especially so if you take this dev time and money that would have been thrown at asset fidelity and and debugging/learning how to properly use a fancy pants engine with all the bleeding edge shit...

... and instead, i don't know, maybe make a more interesting and fully fleshed out core game loop, or have more content, more levels, more narrative.

Also that and just uh, fuck publishers, fuck marketing, this is a video game, not an investment strategy for millionaires snd billionaires.

Now, you can charge $20 - $40 bucks for what is basically a decent game by 10 years ago standards, and yep, it ain't guaranteed to make you into a millionaire yourself, but as long as you're breaking even, able to pay yourself (and the rest of the dev team), you did it, you won.

...

How often do we see seemingly very basic in concept and very simple in graphics games break out and become a massive indie hit game?

How often do we see that having near infinite money to throw at a AAA super game for a fucking decade is more likely to result in a giant disappointment that gets tossed aside when the next version comes out?

My point here is, in addition to the nostalgia/style factor, there are also very grounded, practical, material reasons why just generally lower fidelity graphics are coming back.

...

Also obligatory Godot plug.

Its basically Unity, but free, and open source, at this point.

it’s not hard to relate to their frustration either, as they are basically seeing the unintentional “flaws” they failed to iron out celebrated as “signature” characteristics of the games they created

They are signature, and that's why they're an aesthetic choice. I've heard people refer to the N64 as a "blur factory", because it was low res with even worse textures, if it had any at all. Likewise, the PS1 looked like everything was under water. If your stealth game has a secret agent and a PS1 aesthetic, we know you're trying to take a shot at MGS1. If your horror game has a PS1 aesthetic, we know it's your spin on Resident Evil or Silent Hill. That signature look conveys to its target audience what kind of game they're making, and it conveys it very quickly. As a bonus, it can often be cheaper than trying to make a modern art style with fewer "flaws".

Nostalgia turns it into an art style and aesthetic. The same thing happened with pixel graphics. We're going through the ages of video game graphics again as people that grew up with those games are now the ones creating the games. In a few years i bet we'll start seeing games with the aesthetic of GameCube and the PS2 games.

Personally I think it's a good thing. When it turns into an aesthetic it never truly dies and it makes the style timeless. We'll be seeing pixel graphics and PS1 style graphics in games until people get bored of it, which they never will.

It's not just nostalgia. Things were less enshittified in that era. The writing, story telling, world building, and creative direction were far superior and games were weirder. That's why I like the style anyways

gameplay > graphics

A programmer not understanding aesthetics. That tracks. Does this dude not understand that these modern nostalgiacore games don’t have 150 people working on it like FF7. Devs choose these aesthetics in part because they are cheaper to make.

People just be having fun man.
Not to mention 3D modeling is pretty hard, it’s no wonder indie devs who are often self-taught artists/modelers/coders/everything-ers are doing it.

Props to this article for actually attempting to explain about how 3d graphics worked

Well there's still new movies made in black and white

Really? You don't understand why people might look back fondly on the hardware limitations of early games that they now feel nostalgic for? There are still people making Game Boy games and physically releasing them, to the point that there's now third-party handhelds that can play GB/GBC cartridges. There's still a thriving Commodore 64 gaming community.

Edited for tone, I was having a bad day earlier.

“Back in the day, we used to put in painstaking work and made many futile efforts to avoid texture warping, only for it to be called ‘charming’ nowadays.”

I like the look of Carrier Command 2, and that doesn't even have much by way of textures; it uses mostly untextured polygons, with some low-resolution nearest-neighbor-scaled textures for things like displays.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z15zGaCUjxo

Ah, that ol "Papa-Lucas-Syndrome" sadly there appears to be no cure :(

I recently started Shenmue 3, and I’m a little sad it’s so sharp and high res. It’s still excellent so far, but it’s missing some of the charm.

Nostalgia is a helluva drug.

Yeah I don't get it either.

When 3D games first came out, I stopped playing 2D games altogether. Needless to say, I don't miss the blockiness of PS1 games.

I'm an absolute graphics slut but IDGAF. I love modern tech like path tracing so much that I saved up and bought a 4090 at launch. No regrets.