Would you use free assets in your games?
I would, and I don’t think there’s any shame in it.
I’ve never really understood the stigma around using free assets in game development. Sometimes, people talk about them as if downloading a free model or sound somehow makes the rest of your work less valuable.
But why?
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, assets are the individual things that go into a game: trees, buildings, characters, sounds, animations, textures, and so on. Making all of those takes time, and creating a game involves much more than making its individual parts.
If someone offers a useful asset for free and allows others to use it, I see that as an opportunity.
Free doesn’t mean bad.
The price of an asset doesn’t tell you whether it looks good, works properly, or fits your game. A paid model can be unsuitable for your project, while a free one can be exactly what you need.
Some creators choose to share their work because they want to help other developers. Kenney, for example, makes its game assets available under CC0, allowing people to use them without requiring credit. These resources are offered for a reason: so people can build with them.
There’s nothing embarrassing about accepting that help.
Your time matters, too.
Imagine you need a simple chair for a room in your game. You could spend days learning how to model it, give it the right surface details, and get it working in the engine. Or you could find a suitable free chair and spend that time improving something the player will actually do.
Neither choice is automatically wrong. If you want to learn how to make furniture, creating the chair yourself makes sense. If your goal is to finish a playable game, using an existing one might make more sense.
Personally, I don’t think developers should feel pressured to spend days proving they can make an ordinary chair when their game needs attention elsewhere.
That time could go towards a better mission, smoother movement, clearer menus, or fixing an annoying bug.
A downloaded asset doesn’t build the game for you.
This is probably the part that gets overlooked most often.
Downloading a door doesn’t make it open. You still need to decide how the player interacts with it, whether it needs a key, what happens when it’s locked, and how it connects to the rest of the game.
Downloading trees doesn’t create an interesting forest. You still have to build the space, create paths, place things thoughtfully, adjust the lighting, and make sure the game runs well.
The person who made the asset did valuable work. The person who turns it into part of a playable experience also does valuable work.
Using someone else’s model doesn’t erase everything you built around it.
You can use the same pieces and create something different.
Two people can cook with the same ingredients and make very different meals. I think game assets work in a similar way.
The same house model could become a peaceful home in one game and an abandoned building in another. Different lighting, sounds, surroundings, and events can completely change how that place feels.
Custom artwork can certainly help a game stand out. But a game’s identity also comes from its ideas, its atmosphere, its story, and the way it plays.
Every rock and table doesn’t need to be exclusive for the overall experience to feel personal.
Free assets help you find out whether an idea actually works.
An idea can sound amazing when you write it down and feel completely different once you try to play it.
Having models, sounds, and animations available lets you reach that playable stage sooner. You can test a mechanic, try a different layout, or discover that something needs changing before spending months making everything yourself.
And if a free asset still works well in the finished game, why replace it purely because it was free?
I’d rather replace something because it doesn’t fit or causes problems, not because I feel guilty about how much it cost.
Not everyone has a studio’s budget.
A solo developer might be handling the gameplay, environments, menus, sound, testing, and writing. That’s already a lot for one person.
They may not have the money to hire people for every task, or the years needed to become good at every part of development.
Free assets make it easier for people to learn and give their ideas a real chance. They can also leave room in the budget for things that need special attention: perhaps an original main character, music, or an important location.
Using free resources where they fit can help you afford custom work where it matters most.
Of course, you still need to choose carefully.
Not every free asset belongs in every game.
Some won’t match the look you’re going for. Some might slow the game down or take too much effort to adjust. You also need to check what the creator allows you to do with them and give credit when required.
And you should be honest about your contribution. Using someone’s model is fine when you have permission. Claiming you made that model yourself is a different issue.
Those are fair things to discuss. But none of them makes using free assets shameful.
Judge the result.
If a game looks messy, runs badly, or isn’t enjoyable, those are fair criticisms. Explain what isn’t working.
Simply saying “that’s a free asset” doesn’t tell me what’s wrong with the game. Paying for the same object wouldn’t suddenly make the gameplay better.
For me, the question is simple: does this asset fit what I’m making, and does using it help me move the project forward?
If the answer is yes, I’m happy to use it.
I respect people who create everything themselves. I also respect people who know where to spend their time and use the resources available to them.
So yes, I would use free assets in my game. Why should a useful resource become something to be ashamed of just because it didn’t cost money?
Top comments (9)
I run into the same argument in the MVP world, just with different pieces. When I build backends for clients, everything load-bearing is off-the-shelf — managed auth, hosted databases, queue services — and nobody serious has ever asked whether I "really built it." The game-dev version of your line is: the downloaded door doesn't open by itself. The invisible work — error handling, retry logic, the empty-state copy — is where the craft lives, and that's the part nobody can download.
The "same ingredients, different meals" analogy is doing real work here. Two games built from the same asset pack read as entirely different games if one has coherent level design and the other doesn't, which tells you the asset was never the identity.
Where do you draw the line, though — is there any piece you'd always build from scratch, even as a solo dev with no budget?
Yes! Always the logic behind things, i have taken paid courses just to learn how to build stuff in order not to follow tutorials from 10 years ago that no one attend questions anymore. You always know something is well built when you build it yourself. Hence the fails that i post as well. It isn't always milk and honey and sometimes even i hit myself on things i don't know or don't know how to fix. Even tho as a solo dev you are minutios and keep track of schemes of everything you build once just to make it easier to build it the second time you do find yourself tangled in errors or things that change with updates of software and such, and you have to learn how to fix them. so yes AI will never build as well as a human. Also even if you might get lucky to find pieces of logic you wanna build, already built by someone, you might not like how that someone built it or the approach they took for example: a quest system might be data table based or data-driven based. for a small game data table does wonders, for a bigger game it does not. done by yourself is always better. i have done the mistake to use ai in the past for inventory aicons but came to senses quicly. ai is a disease. other devs have other perspectives. the market might not fit your need.
The logic-first rule is the cleanest answer to my question, and your quest-system example is why: a data-table approach that works for a small game breaks at a bigger scale, so borrowing someone else's logic means inheriting their scale assumptions too. I have felt the other side of that bargain as well — building my own logic once, then keeping track of every schema it touched so the second build would be easier, only to get tangled when an update changed the rules underneath it. Which logic do you still build yourself even when a ready-made version exists, and which do you now happily borrow?
None. I never borrow premade logic, I might take inspiration from approaches but always build from scratch. Even tho we lie to ourselves and say we always use the same logic that we store in visual boards on in folders of screenshots or in reusable blueprint, we mostly never do. We always learn new things and apply them to old approached to better our products. But borrowing directly made assets in terms of coding or visual scripting always never fit what you build. Take the example of building an inventory system and wanting to implement a quest system you saw on a marketplace asset because it fits the way you imagined it would look in your game. You take the asset and you start looking at its blueprint and realized it not build the way you built the items you want to integrate it with. When i was younger i used to piece together all sorts of downloaded logic +tutorials and ended up killing dozens of projects because i could not surface from the errors and i could not recover. Many time it got so bad that even the project would not open anymore. And for all those years lost i took paid courses and now i build myself everything I need and the things i don't know hoe to build i direct myself to discord where i know people will be there to answer.
That 'none' is clearer than my question deserved — you draw the line at inspiration, not code, and your history explains why: borrowed logic that did not fit the way you built things killed projects you could not recover. I do the opposite in one place: I borrow plumbing I can read end to end, like a queue, but I still write the rules that decide what counts as done, because that is the part I have to defend when it breaks. Your stricter rule keeps the second build yours.
Honestly, I’d rather see someone finish a great game with free assets than abandon a good idea trying to make everything from scratch. It’s about what you create with the resources you have, not how much you spend.
I very much agree with you!
No shame in free, agreed — but I'd separate two things that keep getting merged here. What people actually react to when they say "that's a free asset" is usually art direction, not licensing: a photoreal tree sitting next to a flat-shaded rock next to a UI from a third pack. Nobody clocks a free asset that's been scaled, lit and colour-matched to its neighbours.
The part that does deserve scrutiny is the boring one — reading the licence. I help run a fan reference site built on PMD SpriteCollab sprites under CC BY-NC 4.0: attribution required, commercial use out. Knowing that on day one decides what you can do with those assets a year later. Free isn't shameful; it just comes with terms.
And that is the risk you take, and that's why you tend to avoid cc's. unless you receive a receipt with it. unreal marketplace provides an email receipt when you download or add something to your library. so even tho you have an asset that once held a licemce and now have another you use it on the terms you got it. but free assets are always a risk yes.