Hyper Crab Tank posted:

Yeah, it's this. Let's say you want to make a, uh... *rolls dice* twin-stick shooter in a *rolls dice* steampunk setting where you fight *rolls dice* dinosaurs from the moon. Now let's also say you've actually got some ambition and good ideas behind your game as opposed to just making something to dump on Steam. You want your game to look good, but also consistent, and to stick out from all the other stuff out there. You want the steamcars to look a particular way, you want the lunarosaurus rex model to feel like it belongs next to the Big Ben model as it crushes it in its huge meaty claws. You want Sir Reginald Gogglehead and Lady Margaret Gearcorset to be the actual characters you designed, not just some generic human model you found on the asset store with a hat you found on the asset store glued on.

Even for small to mid-sized companies, it is near impossible to build a game without having your own artists. Using asset store assets to any major extent will make your game look like, well... an asset flip. Canned assets just don't cut it, with a few exceptions (e.g. you can get some nice water shaders or particle effects or something and that's going to look pretty nice).

Sound is typically heavily altered before it makes it into a final product. Even so, people are in general far less sensitive to sound than to visuals, so you can get away with a lot more re-use. The sound of a footstep on grass is just not going to vary as extensively as the grass texture can. (That said, some games manage to have very distinctive soundscapes - go look at any video on YouTube with the words "half-life sfx" in the title, for example.)