You need both to be successful. If the engine is not up to modern standard the art style has to compensate for an audience to give it more than a second look.

If the gameplay is rubbish no one will play it for more than 10 minutes.

Still I jump at pretty graphics faster than a review of good gameplay simply because many reviewers seem to have no idea what they are talking about or are lying for the payola.

In short.

Fun is a pre-requisite to any effect other mechanics may have on the game.

If it is not fun, it doesn't matter.  It's not easy to make fun games.

League of Legends looks great. GFX alone is not what decides how good a game looks but also artstyle, aesthetics etc. and LoL has excellent aesthetics and art style.

Beside that I agree with the article. GFX, or rather "looks" matters, but not at the expense of gameplay,

"The reason I say this is because the average person will buy a game based on how it looks."

I think you need to seperate what matters for the business from what matters for the experience.  There are two seperate questions here: can I be convinced to buy the box and will I enjoy what's in the box once I have it?

(well, there's also a subdivision of that second question: will I enjoy wrapping my imagination around the first hour vs how will I see the game in a month once my brain has abstracted away all the superficial details and I only react to revelevent information as if I was watching a raw feed of the matrix scrolling down my screen)

Graphics matter just like looks matter IRL. At least to get the consumer to try it out. Example:

A) Hot babe, dumb as a rock. She's a cold hearted <*****> with an awesome rack.

B) Fugly girl with a GREAT personality. Great cook and great with kids!!

Based only on first impressions: Who's going to get picked up at the bar?

Originally posted by OgreRaper
Graphics are not one of the most important things to me. I still play Lineage 1 on private servers sometimes. A game with 1990's visuals. Also graphic style is more important to me than technical graphical stuff. Like to me, WoW looks better than pretty much every other MMO out today, because I think it has a cool art style.

I went back and played Lin before it closed.  It was still beautiful and the music added to the immersion.

Graphics do matter, but immersion matters more to me than cutting edge technology.  Gameplay is the most important thing.

I think that they're 2 different teams that don't really have anything to do with the other.

The graphics people have a head start tho in  that a company can license a really good graphics engine, while you can't do that if you're in the story/game play department.

All other things being even, the game with better graphics will win.

If two games have the same graphics, but one has better game play, the game with better game play will win.

Great graphics could give an otherwise mediocre game a much better reception, but it depends on what that game is competing against.

Concerning selling games, the game's graphics themselves might get the initial sale, but it's more likely that the advertising that's presenting the graphics gets the sale. In the 80s and 90s, video game graphics were pretty bad. Even the players at the time recognized how primitive the graphics were. The game boxes though, those looked great. Cheesy by today's standards, but still, they generally looked really good.

I don't know what all this means. I didn't read the article. Of course graphics matter. They just aren't the only thing that matters.

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Originally posted by Psychow
Graphics matter just like looks matter IRL. At least to get the consumer to try it out. Example:

 

A) Hot babe, dumb as a rock. She's a cold hearted <*****> with an awesome rack.

B) Fugly girl with a GREAT personality. Great cook and great with kids!!

 

Based only on first impressions: Who's going to get picked up at the bar?

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Why is it either/or? Of course graphics matter but they are only part of a game's appeal.  To me, Precu SWG was perfectly acceptable and fine, and everything after that is just gravy.

This discussion is kinda like asking, when looking for a girlfriend, do you go for looks or personality?  Anyone that is firmly in one camp or the other is a bit extreme as most people look for something in between, and both are a matter of opinion.  If the requisite looks and personality are there and either exceeds expectations, consider it a bonus.