Nowadays all games are easy, watered down, or rehashed from another games. It's got to the point where I have look between the cracks of the internet to find a original game that's actually different from the stuff you see everyone else play .

It comes from a basic piece of human psychology, we feel comfortable with things we can easily understand and process. Since the change in our culture of dependency. Now we live where everyone wants something from nothing and thinks that work is not unnecessary. That things are do to them. Well anyway that's a rant. Maybe people just don't feel like losing? Hurts their ego. I think only a expanding person who sees joy in losing.

Back when Video games were just a thing to play when you were bored. Now it's a lifestyle and people like PewDiePie and other LPers aren't helping the state of gaming.

One of the major reasons games are easier now is because of the ability to save your game which changes everything. For example Mr. spurgeonryan here. His problem is made worse by saving. In the NES days he would get to the part he was stuck on lose all his lives and have to start all over. That sounds terrible by todays standards but it would actually give you a break from your frustration as you replayed the part of the game you were familiar with. But since he can save probably right before the part he is stuck on it becomes more like banging your head against a wall over and over again as being stuck at one point becomes the only part of the game you are playing.  Also a lot of older games were made so that you could play them in one sitting if you were good enough because you couldn't be expected to play a game for 15-20 hours straight, if those games had been easy everyone would have just returned the games when they beat them in a day. They had to make them hard so these 90 minute games would take you a week or 7 to beat them the first time.  Also some of those hard games are actually very easy with a save feature, I've play some VC games and some Roms and let me tell you they are way easier when you can save.

DKCTF is satisfying cos it is hard!
always when i die i think: "i gotta be better", and when i beat the stage i feel: "fuck yeah!"
is good to go back to 3rd and 4th gens!

I love the Souls games, but I like to play DKCTF with my kids. If you think it's hard in single player, try the gimped co-op with a 4 year old. We're still on world 2, meanwhile finished Knack together, Mario 3D world, bunch of Lego games. It wouldn't be so bad without a lives system. Either suffer the loading times and start from the beginning every 5 minutes, or farm lives in world 1-1 for an hour to play together for half an hour.

Do people really want to go back to the NES days where 90% of gamers couldn't get past the first level? Where you had to beat the whole thing in one sitting or start all over? Most games worth a damn usually have a difficulty option anyways so I don't see the issue here.

A lot of games in the NES/SNES days weren't actually that hard. They just required you to learn timing. It was memorization based rather than being dynamic. Mike Tyson's Punch Out, which the OP cited as being hard, was a game that I beat pretty much every day without losing after I got the timing down. It was pure cake after that and quite short. I would come home from school, beat a few games that I owned, like Punch Out and Double Dragon II, and then I'd go do something else. As others have said, I think they were trying to mask a relatively small amount of content.

I've always thought the twitch gaming of the arcade/Atari era was harder, as those games often pushed you as far as you could go until it became impossible to keep up.

Personally, I prefer dynamic gaming to memorization based gaming, even if the end result is that it takes less time to beat an encounter.

Older gamers ramped up the difficulty to extend gameplay time. Nowadays you just need fetch quess and back tracking to extend shoert games. It's that simple.

Hard games are great when they are legitimately a challenge like the Souls games and not random bullshit that adds artificial difficulty.

I didn't even like hard games back then! I just kept playing because I had to see what was next. Quite s few games, when I finally beat, I said "Never again!" as soon as the credits rolled. Other games were really incredibly short once you mastered them. They took forever to beat but they were really light on content.

Today's games aren't hard because they don't need to be. They provide the hours of entertainment without the repetiton and the punishing trial and error.

The reason games aren't hard is so they can sell you hard mode as DLC.