Gaming

The director should have reasons for the difficulty of the game. Celeste is a Perfect example. It's hard but it lets you learn and allows you to try again easily even if what you are doing is hard. Hard games that punish you and make you walk for 20-30 mins just so you can learn a few new moves the boss does can be incredibly frustrating. Many people who play these games eventually look at videos online to help after multiple tries because just "getting there" is extremely time consuming. A lot of games have normalized looking things up and that is disappointing as someone who would rather figure it out on my own. But wasting 30 mins to be killed in 2-3 hits from multiple stage bosses is not enjoyable IMHO.

Does anyone remember the devs of Diablo 3 saying that the internal team found the game difficulty is too high and then they doubled it.

And then there is Expedition 33 which added the story mode so that Jennifer English could play it.

I had read some posts on Usenet back then with some players saying UV wasn't as tough as they hoped it would be. (...) I thought "Oh really? Ok then. You're all dead." (...) It wasn't meant to be fair, or even finishable. I can't even get past E1M3 in nightmare. Any level with backtracking would be almost impossible.

- John Romero

Yoshi P (FFXIV): "Yeah, the game was a huge cultural hit that grew more successful with each expansion, so I thought to myself.. now that we've brought in millions upon millions of players, why not nerf all of the overworld content into absurdity to bring in maybe forty or fifty noobs? So I did. And then I changed all of the classes again once everyone had reached max level. Nobody liked that. So I thought.. why not do it again?"

Zenimax (ESO): "So I just kind of made up whatever and then dialed the difficulty down to about a tenth of what it used to be. Now overworld content is on par with swinging an aluminum bat through a pile of packing peanuts. Also, the Second Era was filled with superhero sky ninjas with lava wings who rode around Tamriel upon lightning horses and mechanical spiders. Deal with it."

Game being hard means the struggle of the character can be conveyed to the player.