Alex Hutchinson is an Australian video game creative director best known for his work on Assassin's Creed III and Far Cry 4. He has spent years watching how the games industry spends money, and his conclusion is blunt: developers waste enormous resources by recreating things they have already made. "We do a lot of dopey things in the games industry. We redo too much stuff," he recently told PC Gamer.
This isn't academic complaint. With so many studios short on funding and spiralling budgets no longer an option, the public acceptance of asset reuse has become a matter of survival. Hutchinson, who now runs Raccoon Logic, the indie developer behind Revenge of the Savage Planet, says "we don't reuse enough."
What strikes most observers is how far this thinking has shifted. Years ago, players and critics treated reused assets as evidence of developer laziness. When Activision released Call of Duty: Ghosts and fans discovered its opening mimicked Modern Warfare 2's highly specific animations of injured characters escaping a blasted warzone, the scene was viewed as evidence that the series had lost its power to surprise—a major PR blow for an FPS sold on the promise of expensively-rendered spectacle. Far Cry Primal's reuse of Far Cry 4's map frustrated Hutchinson so much he urged Ubisoft to simply announce it: "Just say it's the same place 40,000 years ago. And then it's cool." They didn't, "and then everyone was like, 'Cheap developers!', as always."
But the conversation has moved. Search YouTube for videos on asset reuse today and you'll notice the tone has turned. The platform is no longer dominated by damning capture of identical animations. It's also home to arguments on 'Why reusing assets is crucial', 'Hating on reused assets is boring', and list features highlighting '5 fascinating examples of FromSoftware's asset reuse'.
From a practical standpoint, the mathematics of modern game development support Hutchinson's case. Reusing assets isn't always a time saver and is a testament to how inventive developers can be. While some gamers might see this as lazy, the reality is this is an important technique and helps devs finish your favorite games in a shorter amount of time. While reusing assets can save time and money, it can also be even harder than making something new. As games become bigger and bigger, with better-looking graphics and more complex systems, it will become harder and harder to make games in a healthy and affordable way without reusing assets.
Hutchinson notes that in Assassin's Creed, "animations move through multiple iterations. Black Flag reused like 80% of Assassin's Creed 3. So there's always some reuse, at least in the big studios." The difference, he suggests, is that the industry has become defensive about it, apologising for something that should be presented as smart resource management.
There are legitimate counterarguments. Some players do experience fatigue when a game feels too familiar. Some games that are just straight asset flips do exist—games made very quickly using pre-built assets purchased on engine stores like Unity, which can be found on Steam and Google Play. But these are different from a developer reusing assets in a creative way. The distinction matters: reusing assets within a coherent vision is engineering; selling pre-made asset packs as finished games is something else entirely.
What Hutchinson and others in the industry seem to be arguing is that honesty matters more than shame. If a team reuses 80 percent of one game to build another, release twice as much content instead of pretending everything is new. Let players see the care that went into the 20 percent they didn't see. Reusing assets is simply a practical solution to cutting down the already painfully-long development times that video games must deal with these days. Creating a video game takes a ton of time, effort, and money, with even the tiniest details coming under scrutiny and going through phases of feedback and iteration.
The harder question for the industry is whether it can sustain its current model at all. While some developers may consider asset reuse a lazy practice, others know that without game asset reuse, building would simply take too long. In a world that demands new content faster than teams can execute, one could argue that game dev asset recycling is a necessity, whether in the traditional video game space or in the new world of VR game development.
Hutchinson's point is less about defending poor work than acknowledging reality. The games that players love—FromSoftware's titles, Nintendo's Zelda sequels, the Yakuza franchise—have all mastered the art of strategic reuse. They succeeded not despite this practice, but partly because it freed resources to focus on what actually matters: gameplay, story, and world building. Until the industry stops treating efficient development as shameful, teams will keep working unsustainably, and the games will suffer for it.