Maybe you haven’t been convinced by a good enough argument. Maybe you just don’t want to admit you are wrong. Or maybe the chaos is the objective, but what are you knowingly on the wrong side of?
In my case: I don’t think any games are obliged to offer an easy mode. If developers want to tailor a specific experience, they don’t have to dilute it with easier or harder modes that aren’t actually interesting and/or anything more than poorly done numbers adjustments. BUT I also know that for the people that need and want them, it helps a LOT. But I can’t really accept making the game worse so that some people get to play it. They wouldn’t actually be playing the same game after all…
Why wouldn’t the developer want as many people as possible to buy the game though?
From a purely financial view, they don’t. There’s a reason why games have become as handholdy as possible. And one of the reasons why the Souls series stood out was because it went in a different direction.
I’ve never made art (incl. games) with the intention of having as many people view it as possible. Many developers make games as a hobby rather than for mere profit, and some try to draw a compromise in the middle.
I know this doesn’t apply as much to major well-known games created by professional game development companies, but there are other incentives guiding development beyond maximizing purchases.
And how many boutique niche Indy games made solely for their artistic merit have you played that actually had an easy mode?
There’s a huge middle-ground between pure artistic pursuit and callous profit maximization.
Plenty of the bigger non-profit games (like FOSS games) have easy modes. I’m actually having a hard time trying to think of ones which don’t. And I’d call them all niche and indie, made primarily for enjoyment over market interests. In games like STK, it’s clear from the bug tracker and forum that the primary devs (passionate and experienced players) are trying to balance their intended experience against accessibility - if some of them just made the game how they think it should be played, it would be very different.
Games used to be art and done for passion.
Having to include an “easy mode” in your game has powerful knock-on effects that change how normal and hard difficulties play too. Timings and quantities that would normally be finely tuned and hand-crafted suddenly need to be highly-variable and detract from the freedom of developing for just one difficulty.
That sounds like an entirely surmountable engineering problem.
It’s not like games are being written in assembly any more.
It goes deeper than just simple engineering though. It affects tone and overarching game design. It is multiple extra dimensions that have to be considered across every aspect of the entire game. If it is done poorly, you get paper dolls on easy mode and damage sponges on hard and nothing of merit to compensate for these facts. The difficulty of the game goes from being genuine to artificial.
That’s why you design for accessibility, and don’t try to cram it in at the last moment. It’s not actually difficult, it just requires engineering discipline.
There are also plenty of Dark Souls clones for people like you who demand nothing but punishment.
I don’t need a game to be hard, I need it to be consistent and well thought-out. Animal Well for example is a rather easy game, but because it only has one difficulty, the developer was able to keep a very tight focus on the world and puzzle design. Everything is layered there, because they don’t have to be containerized and sliced into pieces to account for adjustable difficulty settings.
Or they could have thought it out even better and included difficulty settings.
They have every right to ignore accessibility, but it will always limit their audience.
“artificial difficulty” is poorly defined. Most parts of a video game are artificial. You get 100 health and 5 healing potions? Well those numbers were just made up, and could easily have been 50 and 1, or 200 and 10. The boss takes 5 hits to defeat, or 10, or 3?
I think people say “artificial difficulty” when they mean “I don’t like this”, but that’s not very useful for a discussion without digging deeper.
How can you tell which mode was developed first and which one was tacked on?
In FE: Echoes SoV, for example, I’m pretty sure they developed easy mode first and hard mode got tacked on. But I only played hard mode. Did I play the game “wrong”?