There are stil hard games being made( Dark/Demon souls) and some games are just hard by genre( Bullet Hell). So yeah there still hard games out there if you look for them.

True dat. However, I grew up with an NES and took my lumps on SMB 1 and 3, Mega Man 2, Contra, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the tough as nails single player one), Ninja Gaiden and Street Fighter 2010. I will never go back to them (well maybe the SMB, they're a lot more fun than hard). Maybe I got spoiled, but I no longer enjoy only being able to get through half the game before hitting a brick wall halfway through and having to completely start over.

Hard = Good            Disproportionate amount of punishment for dying or getting hit = Not fun

I really like hard games! But then again I like everything that is hard.

The best selling games were never majorly hard. Just letting you know. Only a minority of people play the hardest games no matter where or when. The barrier for entry usually starts low and at the highest have a thirty minute learning curve at the most. In the  90's gaming magazines used to have editorials with gauges of how long it would take you to learn a specific game. the average learning curve in Gamepro was between 5-15 minutes. 30 minutes 

This. 

This. As soon as I landed from console and ZX Spectrum to PC, I immediately loved the savefile, and it made me love even more hard games that previously in some cases drove me to frustration. BTW, as after those jurassic Pong consoles, my true and only console was the Intellivision, I never developed those twitch skills other console users did, Intellivision gamepad higher precision directional disc, but tiny and stiff action buttons made that console more suitable to games that didn't need fast and furious button mashing, but its keypad with game-specific overlays made some of its games more like what successively we got on PC, my first AD&D game was on Intellivision, and it was the single-player game I played the most on it (with my sister we played mostly Poker&Blackjack and the first Tennis, BurgerTime, Microsurgeon and, with the Computer Expansion, Scooby Doo, but she hated Skiing and Armor Battle and she didn't like the more sophisticated tennis game Intellivision got later and she almost never played single-player games, particularly space combat ones, like Zaxxon, Defender, Space Hawk...).

imo Difference between Hard and unfair. Lots of games end up being unfair :o.

That the reason I hated Tomb Raider, every time I died I had to wait through the 2 minute loading screen and half the jumps I did never worked...

You can thank the pc version for that. Gameplay tailored to quick save, quick load. It was quite a difference playing TR2 on PS1 after playing TR on PC. It was a bit faster to pause and load before you die if you already know your jump is doomed. Then I screwed up and saved instead, putting her in an infinite death loop.

It would be nice to have quick save/load on consoles some time. The tension of walking around on 10 health, save/load to get past the next encounter hoping for a health kit, beats wait 5 seconds for full health. Also nice to be able to do a fun encounter again instantly.

more and more hand holding. people are not used to it anymore. Its like eating food with more and more salt unless not adding salt = no taste.

It takes time to get used to the old way.