Comment by Shawnecy

> What didn’t work

> Content. Brace for an obvious statement: it is one thing to imagine a grand, Daggerfall-scale game in your head, and a completely different thing to actually start building the pieces that make it up.

This is what always kills it for me. It's not so much that there aren't good off-the-shelf content packs, its that unique gameplay ideas with unique visualizations don't have ready made assets. Even for a simple game like pong, if you want to do something graphically unique with it (make the paddle shake, charge up, or have a power bar embedded in it that fills up whatever), then you better be prepared to become an artist or find someone who will be your game's artist.

And also like the article points out, the latter is fine if you're looking to commercialize it, but it doesn't seem like there are many artists offering their skills for free games made casually in a developer's spare time. It seems there's a critical threshold of game development "seriousness" that needs to be committed to by all involved to make it worth the time and effort of others.