So I've got a few points on this. The smallest is that welding is very much an art. Any dingus can stick two pieces of metal together. A consistent bead, a steady hand, it's all on par with painting but no one considers that because it's used practically instead of aesthetically.

That segways to my next point, art isn't just the pictures. I don't have 4 years to learn how to make the art because I'm not passionate about that. I love the mechanics of the game, my creativity is in balancing and abilities, loot tables and incremental growth rates. You wouldn't say the people who decide the spray pattern of digital guns or the appropriate damage for level 12 don't deserve to be in video games because they didn't paint the skyboxes.

I love a story about a single guy making a game from scratch over twenty years as much as the next guy, but it's unreasonable to say that everyone has to do it that way or it doesn't count. Just as unreasonable as saying someone's idea for a game doesn't deserve to exist because they can't pay a team to make it.

To be clear, I'm not defending the slop. There's probably plenty of games on steam that are AI garbage to grab a quick buck. That's fine to hate. But all the people out there that put their hear into the work and wrapped it in the wallpaper of AI, they deserve to be seen. We can't all be good at everything and that doesn't make what we do any less valid.