>Great, so now the code and the assets going with the code, both being used to build the product, are completely out of sync and essentially unsyncable?
no. read up on artifact repositories. you declare the asset version that you depend on in your a build script. the assets are fetched from the artifact repo.
there pros and cons of course...
Yes, that's "essentially unsyncable" when you have thousands of assets and have to keep them synchronised by hand. It has the same sanity as considering tarballs to be a good version-control scheme.
> there pros and cons of course...
I see no pros compared to a VCS which can handle code and other assets in the same repository and keep them naturally synchronised by virtue of them being naturally synchronised.
these assets can be referenced by many other systems, not just your source repo.
Don't you now? How else is your tool going to know which version of an asset it's supposed to fetch from the asset store without you telling it?
> ever heard of ruby gems, maven, gradle, npm? these assets are all versioned and available via http.
> these assets can be referenced by many other systems, not just your source repo.
Wow, great, now game developers can do something they have absolutely no desire to do, at the small cost of not being able to do what they need. I'm sure they'll be thrilled.