I’ve seen a hell of a lot of textures in AAA and Indie come from everywhere and anywhere, I can’t help but notice CGTextures / Gametexture and Quixel (Ubisoft, Blizzard and Infinity Ward use Quixel for example) maps in anything from the big budget AAA’s right down to the little guys… They use asset stores that’s for sure, SpeedTree is another thing which is like an Asset store product for generating trees. I’m using the terminology loosely here, but it’s in the Witcher, Avatar the movie, Saints row. They are literally all over the place…
Trick is to be smart about it, if you do it right nobody can tell :D…
Well unless you use the products and stare at the texures all day, then you really can… After all it’s simple economics, why go through the pain of creating thousands of meshes and textures which you need pay for people to scan and create. When you have them all handily available to give to your artists for them to simply tweak? Are you going to pay the hundred’s if not millions in staff costs for the extra effort… Or are you going to pay a couple of K for a library?
Simple economics, is how AAA works and it’s finally filtered down to everyone…