Not necessarily true. I can churn out game-ready 3D assets pretty quickly and I can't draw anything 2D at all. There's a lot of tools for 3D modelling and texturing that can provide some sort of automation to a degree (e.g. Houdini or even Blender's geometry nodes for procedural stuff [landscapes, mechanical stuff], Substance Designer for procedural materials, Mixamo for premade animations for virtually any scenario that you can simply attach to your models etc.). AFAIK there's nothing like that for 2D.
2D, while maybe fun to draw on a piece of paper, requires a lot of painful manual labor when working with games, e.g. you need to draw all animation frames separately instead of simply keyframing some skeleton as in 3D. Just imagine the process of changing a simple thing like a piece of clothing on a character.
This is really not true for most 2D games. For something like OpenTDD where the art is mostly functional and replacting it will still give you about the same experience as TDD, sure. For something like a Point & Click adventure? Nah, the art and scripting is the game, you might as well create a completely new game at that point. The distinction really has nothing to do with 2D vs. 3D.
A good game engine with good tools can save users who want to write that type of game a lot of effort. You shouldn't have to write collision detection algorithms to give the user a sword/gun/magic spell.
Looks like some of the original Monkey Island games were taken off the site and replaced with remakes, much to fans' dismay. I suppose there are other ways of tracking down the originals.
Har, har!
> some of the original Monkey Island games were taken off the site and replaced with remakes
MI and MI2, replaced with a 'Special Edition' which does include 'classic mode'.
Industry is not ready for leasing the assets to the end-users. Yet, I hope.
I think the reason for this is something you haven't considered: OpenTTD is extremely repayable, long-term fans of this game put thousands of hours into it. An old Point & Click adventure? Long-term fans might replay the game a few times every few years, but I don't think those sort of games will ever inspire the amount of invested effort that OpenTTD can.
Or consider Morrowind, closer to a Point & Click in concept (the art and scripting is a big part of the draw), but known to be a huge time sink that people can easily put thousands of hours into. And again, you see a very high level of investment from the community. Lots of total graphics replacement mods, mods that add huge new levels dwarfing the original game, etc.
It can be, because unless the game comes with all its own assets, it can't be a friction-free install for the end-users.
You can't expect to get the success of OpenTTD if you're unable to put the game on steam, and you cannot put it on steam if it won't run without the original game (which won't be on steam).
There other question of successfully cloning a game is "Will we ever be able to replace the requirement of needing the original game's files?"
With 2D games the answer is almost always "Yes, we can sooner or later have replacement 2D assets".
With 3D games you can forget about it; the effort and skill level is too high for volunteers to make it happen.