the question answers itself, they don't like games that are hard because they are hard. You have to understand that there's people that only plays a few hours per week and they couldn't beat difficult games.

The best thing is to have different difficulties, so people can choose. You want an easy experience? Play easy or normal, do you want a more challenging experience? Play hard or very hard.

As easy as that

I want games to be hard but fair. If I die it's supposed to be my fault, not crappy framerate, or like in the old metroids, enemies spawning inside the doors. :P

I like shooters and changing difficulty in shooters is like changing the accuracy on an aimbot... except the aimbot is given to the AI.
I still rip though em though especially when I have a trophy to show for my efforts at the end of it.

You may have moved on but at least you COULD beat those games, if you wanted to. Kid's these days will never get the same feeling of win as we did after beating Mega Man 2...never. lol

They are easy now because they want the games to appeal to as many people as possible. Also like many have already mentioned, they used to get stuck and move to another game. How do you expect to sell someone a sequel if they don't even bother finishing the first or it left a bad taste in their mouth. They want you to finish the game, they want you to be hooked on the story, and crave more.

I love the accomplishment of a hard game or even the hard to get achievements. I too complain that games are too easy. However, that is why I stick to the multiplayer where I will often run into players on my level or better to keep it interesting.

Just recently I was playing through all the Infamous games again after getting the plat in Second Son. I took notice along the way that in every mission, even the short 2 minute missions had checkpoints after every minor step. Whenever I died I didn't even have to repeat the mission, just put me right back where I died pretty much every time, and all I had to do was kill the last wave or whatever with full health and energy. Stuff like that I hate honestly.

Don't hold my hand through the game, they might as well just have an auto-play feature and let me watch it if its going to be that easy. Games already have easy or even very easy modes, why do they have to make the game itself geared towards casuals? You already kill enemies in 2 hits while taking 100 before you die on easy, what needs to be easier?

This thread has gotten me thinking about my favorite game from the 16-bit era, Gunstar Heroes. It has the perfect difficulty-to-reward/punishment ratio.

Several difficulty settings, that range from giving you a moderate challenge, to allowing you to breeze through, to giving you a proper asskicking and making you feel like the man once you finally beat it. Long levels that send you all the way back to the beginning of the level when you die, but the first half of the game lets you pick the order to tackle them and gives you higher max HP after completing each one. And perhaps biggest of all, unlimited continues. No "HA! YOU JUST WASTED THE LAST THREE HOURS OF YOUR LIFE! SUCKS TO BE YOU!!!" game over screens that send you all the way back to the start screen when you run out of lives. You get your ass handed to you a couple of times, take a breather, jump right back in, do better next time and earn your hard fought victory.

Games like this are my idea of a likable hard game. This is why I remember the 16 and 432/64-bit eras more fondly than the NES era.

Time to come clean: I have played a lot of NES games, but the only ones I have ever finished are TMNT 2 (or three? It's sitting somewhere at my mom's house), Zelda 1 and SMB1. Granted, most of them were from two-day rentals or playing over a friend's or cousin's so I didn't get much time to get skilled at them, and I was in elementary school, so my gamer skillz weren't close to realizing their full potential. Either way, I hang my head in shame to say that I have never toppled some of the biggest mountains in gaming. Zelda 2 and Mike Tyon's Punch Out!! are two of the biggest skeletons in my closet even now. :(

My childhood was filled with found memories of the NES and SNES games too. Game difficulty was quite different back then.

I watched a video from Dark Jak Gaming and that old games were difficult because of the limited memory in the cartridges and you had to buy the: Game Genie, Strategy Guides and subscribe to Nintendo Power in order to complete the game. He's right about the cartridge memory. He said that NES cartridges had 16KB of memory and that SNES cartridges had 16MB of memory, which is very limited compared to today's memory storage on the discs. You know, old games though were more fun because of that challenge. That's why I'm a Retro Gamer, I like the uniqueness and challenge in the games.