I am always fascinated by older gamers mainly because of how rare they are. I wonder now that gaming has become so mainstream will we see an explosion of old gamers in a decade or 2, and how will that change the gaming market to have such a huge age gap/range between their audience.

Yeah, I'm fairly old, 50 is not that far away at this point.

I've always kinda gravitated to mostly more niche genres (back in 80s graphic adventures, war strategies and flight (and sub) simulators, then in late 80s I got into CRPGs) and A and AA games rather than, what we now call, mainstream or mass market AAA games. Occasionally there was AAA game got all my attention and love (like Tomb Raider back in days), and there still are AAA games that I find worth the price and my time, it's just that they are extremely few and far between.

Luckily, there was indie explosion, which is slowly turning into steady A and AA growth, and at the same time there was boardgaming explosion, so I could actually never get to play everything I wanted even if AAA industry completely vanishes.

I am always fascinated by older gamers mainly because of how rare they are. I wonder now that gaming has become so mainstream will we see an explosion of old gamers in a decade or 2, and how will that change the gaming market to have such a huge age gap/range between their audience.

I think in 20 years gaming might be fundamentally different and way more widespread than today. That is, if they figure out how to do "direct to brain" VR. Mix that and sofisticated narrative AIs and you have worlds (and not just games) that most people will want to enjoy, not just what we call gamers these days.

Other branch of that tree depends on if there is viable solution to tabletop volumetric displays in said future - long before video games, there was experience (and there still is) of siiting around the table and playing games. Put some sort of volumetric display in center of that table and all of the sudden there is all sorts of different games you can make specific for that sort of entertainment, combining board and video games.

At least this is what I think are most probable things that can happen in foreseeable future.

Sorry but on the point of complexity neither is Dark Souls nor even GoW (which I had someone talking how its combos were deep and needed to finish the game on the hardest difficult). I have platted all available GoW on PS3 and PS4 (double sometimes) and even GoW PS4 I was able finish the game with basic roll, parry archery. That isn't complex at all, and Souls game are similar or timing your dodge/parry to counter while being patient and managing stamina.

You wouldn't lose anything if anyone else is able to play the game nerfed as I didn't lost my enjoyment of Give me God of War because my 4y son is playing on Give me a Story.

Is your son 3 or 4 years old? I’m confused.

And you let him play such a game at that age? Hmmm. Ok.

Oblivion did that which resulted in silly things like random thieves walking around in glass armor. And if you waited too long to start the story the first quest become pretty impossible as all the enemies would level up yet not your companions. The quest was designed to be done as a group effort, except now your group would be wiped out almost instantly :) It had a difficulty slider anyway so you could always change it.

That was based on your level I'm not sure about games that change based on your performance. In the last of us Ellie would throw you some items in need, that's a form of help when you get in trouble.

Ah, I see. Yeah I recall doing that at least once in a game where I wasn't interested in the challenge, and felt like I was wasting my time.
Not a bad feature to have there, as I felt I saved a could of 10 minute sessions that could be better spent elsewhere, or a challenge that actually felt somewhat rewarding.

It's very possible that an easy mode could affect a hard mode negatively. Though could you give me some examples of elements that have had this effect? Because I can't think of any at this moment (though probably if I think on it mote), though I can give you examples of where the easy mode/assist hasn't had a negative impact on the other modes.

For example, Tekken 7. Imagine balancing the game they intended to do. Then add an assist mode that lets characters perform special moves, or specific combos, with the press of a simple button combination, or mashing one button. And as someone who plays the game normally, that feature doesn't change the way I play.

And here's a hypothetical example. Imagine a Fire Emblem game, where they design the game the way they intended. Then they add an Easy mode, where the only difference is that you dead party members don't die permanently, and you can chose to Continue after dying. In this scenario, that Easy mode would not affect the harder mode's experience.

Another example is, just slash all the enemies HP by 50%, increase your own power by 15%, and call it Easy mode.

Etc.

One of my main concerns with games is if they end up being too easy, after experiencing some really bad easy modes that scarred me for life, such as Resident Evil 4's that locked out entire sections of the game. Though I haven't really considered Easy modes making the Normal/Hard modes worse. Possibly because I don't recall seeing or noticing a concrete example of this occurring.But if you could share some with me, that would be interesting, and another reason for why I'm worried about games being too easy.

 Oblivion bless it's sweetheart comes from Bethesda a company so buggy I'm sure it started life building coaches ,all jokes aside you still need proper implementation and  if your getting wiped out it's not , the Ellie example is a good one of the game helping the player get past a section of game , there is nothing worse than going through a fair bit of a game to suddenly find yourself outmatched by a sudden difficulty spike .

the biggest factor holding back dynamic difficulty is cost it is much cheaper to implement the standard difficulty levels than spending money on producing  and playtestings logarithms that can cope with the variety of gamers and still give a coherent experience.