I'm pretty confused as to why you think I contradicted myself, and your last couple sentences don't really make sense to me. When making a game from scratch, y

I'm pretty confused as to why you think I contradicted myself, and your last couple sentences don't really make sense to me. When making a game from scratch, you need to produce art assets (often 50-70% of the cost of the game is art assets alone), design gameplay mechanics, market the game, test the game, and distribute the game (which, in the old days, often meant making physical cartridges or disks). Let's say that 10% of the labor in making a game from scratch went to programming. When you're re-implementing a game, all you need recreate is that 10%. So if re-implementing a game is an order of magnitude easier than making a game from scratch, there's no reason to think that programming games has gotten any easier.