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Where can I find free game assets?

Where can I find free sprites and images?

Where can I find free sounds for my game?

Where can I find free music for my game?

etc.

These questions are just "list of" questions. I don't doubt their value, but recent StackExchange philosophy seems to be to shun these kinds of question these days.

Pros of keeping them:

  • they're common questions people have, and might drive traffic to the site
  • shutting them down may seem overly moderator-heavy

Cons of keeping them:

  • As with all external resources, there's the risk of them going away, not being maintained, etc.
  • They are usually not very specific, so the variety (and quality) of answers is going to vary wildly
  • Most "professional game developers" probably make their own art (or outsource it)

As always, the guideline of what kind of questions shouldn't be asked is found here: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask

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  • \$\begingroup\$ For posterity, a discussion we had in chat regarding this topic begins here. \$\endgroup\$
    – user1430
    Jan 17, 2012 at 18:08

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These posters have mostly failed to search adequately. "Adequately" is objective in this case, meaning that they didn't find the existing post that answered their question.

While we can't physically force people to search better (adequately), perhaps we can modify the text in the existing post so that it comes up more frequently as the user is typing their question.

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I think these (existing) lists can be useful (eg. to find assets for low-budget or prototyping). IMHO new questions of this type should be closed and currently this seems to work quite well. So I guess we can try to keep it at the currently existing questions.

I think this is also a question to the moderators, because they would be the ones that would have to merge answers to new questions into the existing topics? Then it's also a job for the community to keep this lists up to date by removing dead links etc.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I'm not sure I'd say it "works quite well," I find it rather obnoxious. \$\endgroup\$
    – notlesh
    Nov 26, 2011 at 20:16
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So it seems the moderation policies have pretty much shifted to "list of X" questions not being useful. There are other resources on the internet better suited to these kinds of questions, and I'm updating the faq to call out these questions as being off topic.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ It couldn't hurt to have our own featured wikis for each of graphics, music. \$\endgroup\$
    – bobobobo
    Sep 29, 2012 at 18:28
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Maybe we should compile a list of these resources links and upvote it so it always appears? Then people would be less likely to create new threads. Plus it's useful to have a handy list :P

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    \$\begingroup\$ Voting doesn't "bump" threads. Editing/adding questions does. And I don't think we should be artificially bumping thread, people should be able to find them easily while searching. \$\endgroup\$
    – Tetrad
    Nov 25, 2011 at 19:34
  • \$\begingroup\$ mmm agreed, i first thought if we keep it high enough it will remain in the top voted questions. But i guess you're right. We would just have to keep it updated :D \$\endgroup\$
    – WindowsMaker
    Nov 25, 2011 at 21:31

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