Gamers are more skilled than ever, so why are video games still so easy?

Not too long ago I found myself in a position of taking care of three adolescents who were all gamers. I would play games with them and, to my surprise, I found their skill level in video games to far surpass any level I've ever achieved in my own life. One of them, the youngest, was an actual speedrunner who could reliably perform difficult glitches.

When I think about it, this kind of tracks. Most of youth culture is driven by internet content creators and the speedrun is more popular than ever because of twitch being an ideal environment for it and because of popular speedrunning personalities. They're especially popular among children.

And yet video games released today are still silly levels of easy by default. I once heard someone say that the difference between games made today and games made back then is that games back then were comfortable with just killing you.

When we think back to Gen 2 (Atari 2600 era) and Gen 3 (NES era), they were all pretty hard games and it's easy to attribute this to the Arcade game model. Arcades were an environment where nobody could afford the hardware for the games they wanted to play so they'd rent time at arcades. Arcades were driven by a microtransaction model where you'd pay for "lives" in a video game and the game would just kill you in BS ways to get you to either dump more quarters in or get the queue moving.

When gaming technology advanced to the point where we could take our favorite arcade games home with us, we were happy to be able to just play whenever we wanted. When a game would kill us, we were happy that we didn't have to pay for that death. So we would just keep playing. Additionally, difficulty was the ultimate way to pad out games in this time. If Super Mario Bros was as easy as modern games are today, everyone would finish it in an hour and feel ripped off.

Over time though games got easier, is it because of a demand for easier games? I have a hypothesis on this. I think it was the demand for more story driven content in games. Story doesn't necessarily mean dialogue or cutscenes as you can obviously tell a story with gameplay. But as any film maker can tell you, telling a story is about deliberate flow. If a player is dying over and over and over again like in the NES days, that would disrupt the flow of the storytelling. Players can still die but there's an acceptable allowance for those deaths before the developers consider it a problem.

This bred a perception that a death was a "failure" both on the part of the developer and the player, instead of just being part of the game. It's not profitable to call either a failure so we reduce the amount of ways that players can fail to do anything in games. But not too much because a game devoid of challenge is not engaging and doesn't breed return investments.

What do you think? Do you think I'm wrong?

It's an interesting question. Difficult to establish overall whether they are easier, as it involves some generalising (which genres are we talking about, what age groups, are people making an effort to seek out modern challenging games etc.). I've played some very hard (mostly indie) games over the past few years, but are those more just outliers?

It's because people confuse time spent with difficulty.

Because it takes like 5 years and $300 million to make everything these days it seems and developers want people to see all the content. Old games were hard as hell because you could beat them in like 30 minutes once you mastered them.

We just grew up and got better.

Back in the 80's/90's there wasn't high speed internet or competitive gaming was not mainstream. Kids in those eras played for fun and didn't really care if other kids sucked at the game. it was just fun playing with others. kids in current year need to get good or else no one will play with them. multiplayer games nowadays focus more on competitive play . no one wants to be friends with someone who is hardstuck in silver. no one wants to watch someone play Devil May Cry who can't shotgun cancel or royal guard.

VioletZer0 posted...

And yet video games released today are still silly levels of easy by default.

Key words. Plenty of exceptional challenges exist, they're just usually something you have to look for instead of the default setting. Generally speaking, people that are looking for a challenge are more willing to go out of their way to find it than people that are looking for a relaxing time are to find that, so defaulting to being easier helps prevent the majority of players from bouncing off a game and feeling like they wasted their purchase (or even refunding it, when that's an option).

VioletZer0 posted...

Additionally, difficulty was the ultimate way to pad out games in this time.

That's also a factor. When the industry was smaller, mostly trying to market to kids (who have more free time), and games were relatively more expensive, making a game take longer by killing you repeatedly was fair game because that was the only game you had. You either overcame that or you stopped playing games for a while.

Now, there are so many other options, many of them are cheap enough to pick up impulsively and/or not worry about getting your money's worth out of them, and there's a significant adult audience whose free time is limited enough to not want to spend it being bored/frustrated by their chosen leisure activity. That means that while you can still put a failure state in your games, you need to avoid letting that failure feel like it was a complete waste of time. That lends itself to design choices like generous checkpoints, infinite lives, and the entire concept of a roguelite (that is, a roguelike with metaprogression, since there's some debate over exactly what the term means).

DeathMagnetic80 posted...

Because it takes like 5 years and $300 million to make everything these days it seems and developers want people to see all the content. Old games were hard as hell because you could beat them in like 30 minutes once you mastered them.

That too. There's some artistic merit to be enjoyed in creating something so hard as to be exclusionary, but at the end of the day more people playing a game tends to both feel better and pay the bills better than fewer people playing it. Given that significantly more people will bounce off of a game for being too hard than will for having to turn on a hard mode or even for being too easy (particularly where you usually have to get pretty far into a game to conclude that it won't challenge you at all, thanks to difficulty curves, and by that point the sunk cost fallacy is a motivator to finish), it just makes sense to prioritize accessibility.

oh yeah. if a journalist can't beat the tutorial IGN will give the game a low score.

I am objectively worse at video games than I was like 15 years ago lmao, I'm not sure I entirely agree with the premise of this topic. Games in the 80s and early 90s were unforgiving, maybe developers made them easier starting in the mid 90s so that the majority of players could actually experience the entire game.

I used to be high tier at bullet hells but I have since lost interest in that genre. But I am better now than I was in other regards than I was as a kid.

adjl posted...

Key words. Plenty of exceptional challenges exist, they're just usually something you have to look for instead of the default setting. Generally speaking, people that are looking for a challenge are more willing to go out of their way to find it than people that are looking for a relaxing time are to find that, so defaulting to being easier helps prevent the majority of players from bouncing off a game and feeling like they wasted their purchase (or even refunding it, when that's an option

I should provide some context.

What got me thinking about this was that "beating the game" lost its meaning in favor of finishing the game.

Games today are designed to be finished by everyone where as back in the day seeing the ending was an achievement.

I also think there is just this general lack of trust from gamedevs to trust their players to figure stuff out. From Software not including a difficulty selector on their games is a huge deal because they just trust you'll figure it out eventually.

VioletZer0 posted...

Games today are designed to be finished by everyone where as back in the day seeing the ending was an achievement.

Depends a lot on the style of the game. For a story-driven game, of course they're designed to be finished. They're trying to tell a story, not to tell 2/3 of a story. To some extent or another, this has been true for as long as there have been story-driven games. Even back on the NES, RPGs and other story-heavy games did not follow the arcade-style structure of readily killing you and making you start all over again, recognizing that that's a terrible way to tell a story.

There are still plenty of games today, though, that are hard enough that fully beating them is unusual. They just tend not to be ones that get significant mainstream attention because cinematic, story-driven games (also multiplayer, which can't be "beaten") tend to be more popular. Broadly, though, the popularity of rogueli(k/t)es is based on the core idea that dying repeatedly and never actually beating the game can still be fun, provided the game is designed such that you can have fun never beating it. That's actually very similar to the arcade model, just usually with some variation from run to run so it's less a matter of trying to learn the same pattern every time.

Games that are easier appeal to a wider audience thus ensuring more potential income from the product.