It is in many cases.
Look to the desperate logic leaps just in the interrum between your post and mine, it makes NO sense to NOT choose to make things easier.
Sure there is a logical reason. People seek challenge, which is why challenging games sell. Creating a product people want to be compensated for it is as logical a reason to produce something as it gets. Refusing to acknowledge that doesn't make that argument illogical, it makes
you illogical.
To our ancestors, this made sense. WHY would anyone CHOOSE to live where there was no game to hunt? Tasty vegtables and fruit to gather? It would be suicide to CHOOSE the harder path.
Our brains to a degree are wired that way still, and in the real world, that still makes sense if only from an efficiency angle.
So you've fundamentally failed to consider the reality surrounding the fact that our desires in recreation and escapism don't mirror our pursuits for survival. This should be obvious when looking at the actual games we as a species produce.
If you want to talk about our ancestral drives, you need to look holistically rather than at efficiency in isolation. We weren't wired to just seek survival, we were wired to seek prosperity, to take whatever we could grab, and to idolize the ideal of those who could prove their superiority.
That translates into the games we play so far as this argument is concerned. We create glamorized scenarios surrounding circumstances we would never want to encounter in life, the risk of life and limb and the disregard for comfort go against our fundamental drives, yet that's what we create when we know we have the safety net of separation from this fantasy and it's lack of real consequence.
That's part of why we seek the scenarios we do, and that sense of dominance and competition underlying it is why many seek the challenges they do both in and out of gaming.
Again, if your accounting of human motivations can't explain the state of what real people do, it's your understanding that is flawed.
Thing is, when offered this it becomes hard to go back to it not being there (again, the desperate screed posts you see here and there, blissfully unaware that such a thought MIGHT have been made or even *gasp* refuted previously), and the insults fly without a second thought. I mean why would anyone DO that to themselves? They must be a minute, elitist masochist core amirite?!?!!
You almost sound sarcastic here, which would hint that maybe you understand the absurdity of your position when our gaming sphere idolizes one of the worst human made atrocities in history. But unfortunately, you seem to be serious.
To go deeper, we have seen difficulty levels "slide" for lack of a better term, over the last decade ever since feeding this neurotic take on QoL became ascendant circa 2006 (when budgets ballooned). If such things were done in better faith, ESPECIALLY from us in the field, such things would be at worst neutral, and largely truly a boon to the industry, with varying games aimed at different markets and well-adjusted difficulty levels for those really good developers who know what's what.
There is an obvious correlation you hit on there. Budget necessitated mass appeal as price points are largely fixed. That means high budget games can't subsist on niche markets. But that's the isolated case for those games rather than a concrete indicator of the underlying condition of the human quest for efficiency.
Gaming itself is an inefficiency, and it's fundamental defining point, interaction, is nothing but an interruption on the efficient course of passive content consumption. Per the root of your argument gaming itself is a media conceived in conflict with human nature even moreso that wasting time on unproductive recreation to begin with.
And again, we're creating adverse situations to begin with.
But it can't often, as we're wired to seek the path of least resistance It's quite honestly a miracle high-tuned games or "make your own damn difficulty levels" games or
"hidden in plain sight difficulty levels" got made in the more dogmatic Gen 7 environment, and we're largely past that, though the fixation, as we've seen here in this thread, remains.
Are we? If the games keep coming out then perhaps it's your expectations that are once again in error. Basic principle here, if things consistently violate your model viewpoint and do so profitably, you model clearly doesn't account for a population sizeable enough to be profitable, and thus can't and won't accurately predicts why things are being made. And if it's consistently wrong, it's probably because the underlying beliefs are also wrong in some way.
