I mean, the 'starving artist' is a long-standing cliche for good reason. I doubt it would be that hard to find hundreds of artists here prepared to work for almost nothing. Some will even do it purely for the exposure if the core game idea you pitch is really promising.
A lot of people love making art of some sort but the market for that work is crowded so wages are low and only exceptional work goes anywhere in career terms. With AI in the mix it is only getting worse lately.
I have a comissions area on Ko-fi and charge really low amounts, like well below minimum wage, and for members it gets basically near $1/hr in effect.
Of course, actually linking to that page on itch will result in automated warning and suspicion of 'malware' as with any recent link going out from the site, due to scammers abusing this site and community lately.
It is Ko-fi and username matthornb. All I can say on that. I also have a ton of itch asset collections and those are beginning to take off.
https://matthornb.itch.io - and as with the commissions I have on Ko-fi the pricing drops to ridiculously low levels at times. Even more so. 5000+ asset files, years of work often gets bundled there for about $1.50. The good news is it is somehow working out well anyway. The gamedev community circa 2026 is quite big, there are likely a few million active gamedevs out there so if even 1% of the world's indie developers discovered I exist and found my work of value it would be a massive, gigantic success in my view. Already have made 200+ sales so it is starting to work.
Indie gamedev is risky and rarely pays the bills - just over 82% of indie dev projects make below minimum wage once released given the time invested - but asset creation is slightly less so (maybe). You are selling shovels in a gold rush basically - the people searching for indie gold have terrible odds and the people selling tools maybe not much better but it is at the very least a way to diversify product lines and asset collections can be completed really well in weeks or months, not years like a really well made indie game.
I see where I am, living costs pared back heavily, no car, no rent, just hanging out in a little home in a walkable town. I can live on below $10k/year. So in my view minimum wage isn't necessary, I can hit below half that for work done and be fine, but if something takes off I can just save a little but mostly just donate a lot. I look at the sales of Steam games and realize I only need to be above the bottom 25% of Steam releases and I will be able to justify continuing game creation so I am lucky in that sense. I can live doing work I actually enjoy the process of and many people cannot say that. I'll never thrive exactly doing this but that is fine. Accumulation of money isn't my metric for personal success. Not even in the top five for me TBH.