I understand and agree with the general thrust of your 2nd paragraph there, though I wanted to chime in to say that I can attest first-hand it was pretty easy to prototype game ideas as far back as 1983, at least. I personally was doing it back then, in BASIC and 6502 ASM on the Apple II. There were even tiny indie shops back then making and selling their own games to the public. You usually found out about them from friends, or printed catalogs of distributors, or on BBS forums. In some ways, game dev has gotten "easier" since then, though in other ways arguably harder -- expectations are higher, there's vastly more competition both within games and across other media and other sources of entertainment on the web, and also the hurdles imposed by the App Store type middlemen.

Everything old is new again.