People who prefer gameplay over graphics. Many people and kids don't mind the "ugly graphics" because they only care if the game looks fun to play. Games are fundamentally different from movies, for instance, if a car in a driving game controls badly, no amount of graphical polish will save the horrible driving experience. Whereas if a game has low fidelity graphics, good gameplay can compensate for the lower quality art.
The reason why "pixelated" games are still around is because people like variety. For instance not everyone during the Super Nintendo era was gung ho for photorealism. In fact many of us oldsters couldn't give a damn about whether something looks realistic or not, we care about whether the game is fun to play.
If we were talking Chess, I'd agree. I don't need the unity engine for a chess game. But do you want the 'variety' of just worse experiences? Would you rather play the original Command and Conquer over the later C&C's, if not a modern RTS, other than for the historical experience? As I said before, Gilligan's Island has nostalgia, but would it really be a good prime time series today?
There's a reason Imax movies are widely appreciated as a step up in movies, why 4k is preferred over old CRT's. Above games like 90s LucasArts were mentioned - yet there's a reason they made remastered versions of Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttled and Grim Fandango and it wasn't because pixelated is 'better', only historical/nostalgic. I can understand SOME games as exceptions on pixelation in theory.
No good examples come to mind, though.
We're not talking about where it has some purpose - when Fallout adopts some old 50's style for its showing old cold war movies with black and white low res bad acting grainy films, that's great, there's a reason for it, an aesthetic that needs that. When you're exploring an old dungeon, no one says 'this game would be better is this were a modern, clean, brightly lit prison'.
My point is, saying 'preferring gameplay over graphics' doesn't answer my question. It's just reasserting 'graphics don't matter' without explaining why outside of limited cases where there are reasons for that.
If I asked why someone would prefer the original "Superman TV series" over modern Marvel movies other than its historical interests, and they said 'because we prefer quality content over visuals', that wouldn't really answer the question why they think the content was better quality in that series, much less why the low production values are an improvement.
Now, the original Twilight Zone over the color 'Night Gallery' series much less modern attempts?
Yes, because I think there the content really is better, and even that the black and white aesthetic doesn't even really detract and many could feel adds to the experience. But I'm not asking about apples and oranges here, quality pixelated gameplay versus bad nie graphics gameplay, I'm asking about pixelation preference for the same 'good gameplay'.
That's the apples and oranges answer you gave with a 'good' driving game and bad graphics over a 'bad' driving game with good graphics. That's not my question. My question is, for the same 'good' driving game, why would driving around with 8 bit graphics be a plus over nice graphics?
You can add my favorite racing game - Burnout: Paradise City - to that list of 'good' games remastered for improved graphics supporting my point.
To repeat, it's not about there being some nostalgia appeal, and the ease of development of pixelated games. It's about why they seem more attractive to some players than those things explain.
Games like a remastered 'Day of the Tentacle' will include original graphics as an option, but for historical purposes, because it's fun to see what it looked like.
But if you can say why someone might say 'I prefer the original DotT graphics', other than nostalgia, that's what I'm asking.