Quote Originally Posted by Hawklaser View Post
I'd disagree that hard games don't sell. The Dark Souls franchise is a very good example. The problem a lot of hard games run into is they are Punishing and not Challenging. Punishing games are the ones that don't sell, and its much easier to create a punishing game than a challenging one.

Early on there seemed to be a better understanding and ability that allowed more games to actually be challenging and not punishing. You can probably thank arcades and the coin-op machines for that. They had to find the right level of challenge to get people to keep plugging those machines. Punishing games, would be quickly walked away from, while the challenging ones would keep people playing. And for most early console games, they were designed by the same people designing for the arcades.

Some of the old MMO mechanics like xp lost on death were more on the punishing side of the equation.

So the question isn't so much about how to not add difficulty and challenge, but how to not make it punishing.

Sadly the tolerance for challenging games went down because of the trend of developers shying away from making challenging games, due to lumping challenging and punishing games together as hard. And thanks to punishing games far out weighing the challenging games, it was assumed both didn't sell. Which is most of what lead to the glut of easy games.

So the question becomes how to add some challenge without it being seen as punishing.
souls games are not hard, you can make them very easy and 1 hit kill bosses or just summopn other players and let them carry you.