Comment by turbinerneiter
6 years ago
I wonder if it would be possible to "skin" the games. Allow for artists to reskin your game with "better" art. Let them put a price-tag on it and see how many of the people who dislike the art will be convinced that way.
It seems to me that for indie game devs, you will always have games driven by what the developer is good at. Great artist, great looking game, great writer, well written game and so on.
I was gonna say this as well. The videogame community has several fantastically talented people in it, creating /tons/ of stuff as a hobby.
Just look at all the mods and assets available on e.g. Steam marketplace or Mod DB, some of them entire games like Black Mesa: Source or Enderal. There already exist reskins of videogames (like the various Minecraft texture mods) and graphical improvement mods (like GTA V's "NaturalVision Remastered") some of which is done without any sort of official API.
(One would probably call this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_labor, but I strongly dislike the term due to its association with big$ milking fans.)
Given some thought about a general framework for this the ability to reskin might be a nice thing to have.
His site says he's constantly looking for freelance artists, and he has made a point of how he makes a lot of his money from reskinning and re-releasing his back catalog, so if one of the many people who seems to be so dead certain he'd do much better with better graphics and that it isn't such a big job wants to put their time/money where their mouth is, they could always contact him and propose a profit share.