People will spend whatever it takes to light up their cab like a Christmas tree, but they won't spend a dime on artwork.
It’s really less about spending money on art work and more that I was hoping I could make something myself that I could be proud of. I agree the collage looks like a pixelated blobby mess and I wanted to just confirm that others saw it the same way.
In general, I'm not a fan of pixel art for side-art. My philosophy is pixels are meant for on-screen, side art is supposed to be flashier, higher quality, stylized to attract attention.
Also, I never was on-board with putting the title of the cabinet on the side-art. That's what the Marquee is for. It always looks so tacky when people bombard their cabinet with the same title graphics that is on the Marquee.
But, people want what they want.
The collage
can work if you were able to tastefully add thin outlines to each character's sprite, . It'll still look a bit noisy, but you'll need something to differentiate each character from each other.
But overall, relying solely on pixel art makes the cabinet look underwhelming IMO.