I'm viewing it from a general consumer perspective. If you watch lots of different people playing games, you get a better idea for what's 'difficult'. I know plenty of people who'd struggle like Dean did. It does seem odd for a seasoned veteran gamer, but then I've seen seasoned gamers go to pieces on a touch screen because they approach it with a different mindset. Cuphead is a very different game to the usual games Dean plays.
Yes, I agree. Back in the day, games were HARD and that's where you got your longevity, because the game that could be completed in 20 minutes end to end took weeks to learn to beat. Why did we persist? Because there was no alternative! Now there's tens if not hundreds of millions of gamers, and plenty of the old guard who grew up with stupidly hard games now haven't the time to spend on challenging titles, not to mention their skills are rusty, and thousands of games to choose from. Why spend half an hour and ten bucks on a game that'll be frustrating and have you throwing your controller at the wall when you could spend ten bucks on a game that's more satisfying based on your current skill-set?
It's the relentless march of change, I'm afraid. The solution is to come up with designs that scale and adapt accordingly. Cuphead could be given fixed encounters for noobs and respawning encounters for vets, for example. Every play through by the noob, they'd learn the next step on the list of instructions, get a sense of progress, and be comfortable. Over time they'd develop a better skill set that could adapt to the game 'proper'. Or, have devs that target a niche, like Dark Souls. If you're lucky, the difficult might hit cultural resonance and you get lots of sales because of the difficulty. But that's luck and something you can't rely on. I've seen a fair few mobile titles marketed as 'the hardest game in the world' hoping to reproduce the odd success of Flappy Bird, to no avail.
