Comment by Cthulhu_

In fact one could argue it makes it harder; if the barrier to entry for making video games is lowered, more people will do it, and there's more competiton.

But in the case of video games there's been similar things already happening; tooling, accessible and free game engines, online tutorials, ready-made assets etc have lowered the barrier to building games, and the internet, Steam, itch.io, etcetera have lowered the barrier to publishing them.

Compare that to when Doom was made (as an example because it's a good source), Carmack had to learn 3d rendering and making it run fast from the scientific text books, they needed a publisher to invest in them so they could actually start working on it fulltime, and they needed to have diskettes with the game or its shareware version manufactured and distributed. And that was when part was already going through BBS.