Pixel art has a ton of advantages: * It's cheap. It takes as much talent to make great pixel art as anything, but it takes less time to do than most styles. So

Pixel art has a ton of advantages: * It's cheap. It takes as much talent to make great pixel art as anything, but it takes less time to do than most styles. Some cartoon vector styles or voxel styles could compete here. * Passable pixel art is relatively easy. A team with mediocre art skills can still do something okay this way. And even a team with a great artist can get away with letting the programmer draw some objects. * It's a well-defined aesthetic. A lot of the work of art is defining an art direction for the project. Some pixel art games have great art direction, but most get away with looking roughly like Final Fantasy 4. Only photorealism does better at being pre-defined. * It's already accepted. If you go for a non-traditional low-fi aesthetic, even if it is artistically stunning, some people will see a low resolution or low polycount and say the graphics are bad. * The toolchains exist. You can build cool artistic styles around a novel way of rendering things like making everything out of particles or using triangular pixels. But Photoshop won't draw on a triangular grid. * The artists are already there. You can hire someone who knows pixel art. It's harder to find someone who can draw Cuphead or do good work in a janky one-off tool chain. * It plays well with the medium. Pixels and polygons are the native elements of the way games are rendered. Any minimalist style other than low-res or low-poly is just a simulacra of minimalism: you could draw stick figures, but that requires the same graphical freedom as a high-res game.