>>2759250I have a hard time believing this.
Look at any modern game nowadays and you'll notice quite quickly 90% of the 150+ credits are given to artists. Sprites simply don't require the man power that full 3d assets do. You've got to model, mesh, skin (both texture and normals), key frame, and then tweak the results to get good 3d animation.
Sprite based games can be created with a handful of artists that either hand draw on paper and then rotoscope, or just sit down with basic graphics software and do pixel art. Granted good pixel artists are hard to come by now because of the shift to 3d.
I think the reason why sprites are dying is because businessmen think that's what most people want, and they are probably right.
You can see this in other games. One notable example was Yoshi's Island. Executives wanted prerendered everything because Donkey Kong Country had been so successful because of just that. Developers wanted a more sprite drawn approach. In the intro you can see the prerendered garbage, and it's objectively worse than everything that came after it in the game. However it took incredibly talented people who knew the hardware very well to make such a beautiful game using only sprites and convince the execs they were wrong.
