You don’t have to play difficult games. Not everything has to cater to a wide audience. Most of today’s re-boots and sequals were from stories that catered to a niche audience only to lose its appeal by going too mainstream…
It would also seem like bad business to leave it out of your niche game, unless the niche is specifically about the difficulty level. Why would you want to eliminate whole chunks of your already limited number of potential customers by only offering a very challenging difficulty?
You don’t have to play difficult games. Not everything has to cater to a wide audience. Most of today’s re-boots and sequals were from stories that catered to a niche audience only to lose its appeal by going too mainstream…
Adding a difficulty slider is easy, doesn’t take much time, doesn’t change much about the experience, and allows more people to enjoy your media.
So leaving it out is lazy game development.
Niche audiences is fine, gatekeeping isn’t.
It would also seem like bad business to leave it out of your niche game, unless the niche is specifically about the difficulty level. Why would you want to eliminate whole chunks of your already limited number of potential customers by only offering a very challenging difficulty?