Dude, don't listen to him.

Wow.

Mr_P3rf3ct, you're hardly the authority on industry art practices, so please don't try and sound like it. It's pretty rude to knock someone's information aside like that, especially given their comparable experience to your own.

I'll grant you that, much like 3d modeling packages, you can learn and practice the underlying principles (of art, of box/organic modeling, and so on) in freeware or in multi-thousand-dollar software with little difference. That part of the message is fine. So for someone still getting their feet wet in producing artwork, use whatever is available. Just know that if you do pursue the career into more professional settings, it'll benefit you greatly to learn Photoshop's workflow and interface, some of the tools available in the PS suite are incredibly handy, and as multiple people have pointed out, it interfaces better with many standard tools much better than any other option.

This is coming from someone that works primarily in Blender and Sketchbook Pro: I would give an arm for some of Photoshop's tweaking tools alone, they blow Sketchbook's manipulate tools out of the water; and ZBrush is on my wish list for its UV and texturing pipeline, even though Blender has its own sculpting suite. The bottom line is about efficiency and speed. Often the difference between pro(industry) artists and hobbyists/amateurs isn't the quality of work (there are a LOT of great artists out there) but how fast they're producing art at that quality.

Why like this now?!

Because the other thread has nothing to do with this one.

Also, because this is the question that was asked:

I stumbled upon this blog on being a games artist and in the "What software I should learn" section, it says " For starters, you should learn Photoshop. It's pretty much the industry standard for 2D artwork. " Why is it this case?

And Ashaman's response was several reasons why Photoshop is the industry standard, and to be a professional games artist you'll want to be familiar with the tool, since most professional game studios use it for many reasons listed in this thread. And then you jumped in and said OP shouldn't listen to all that, due to some personally conceived idea of how the industry works. Which I decided to call you out on because, let's face it: you don't have the experience or insight to make that claim.

This has nothing to do with "having to use photoshop to be an artist", and is what I went on to say right after: you can practice and improve your art skills with a pencil and paper, much less any software suite. Hell, sculptors are artists and they don't use photoshop. But studios pay the exorbitant licensing fees for the PS suite for reasons, and they'll want their artists to use it, for reasons.

Unless you're an artists with years of experience, please don't try and undermined me like that again.

This is what we call irony.

For someone to say that you have to use Photoshop to be an artist, yeah I'm knocking that aside.