xhrit

it is a well known industry standard design philosophy.

"At the time, a console title cost something in the realm of $100 in today's dollars (or over €85-95), which made each game purchase an investment requiring long consideration and thoughtful planning. At that price, every game needed to last weeks, if not months, to justify the investment. Most games achieved this with the good old “Nintendo-hard” philosophy: Brutal challenges make a relative dearth of original content last longer."

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/09/too-much-of-a-good-thing-mourning-the-slow-death-of-the-retail-game-store/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard

When an MMO launches it normally has little content and uses difficulty to pad playtime, especially subscription MMOs like WOW and pre-one tamriel ESO. Typically an mmo reduces difficulty of old content over time, when new content becomes available.

I do agree that the effect is much more pronounced the more popular a game is. LoTRO at least added some of the overworld challenge back with an optional difficulty slider after community backlash, and I'm not sure that a less niche game would have bothered.

Games made in the early 90’s were made for cartridges and floppy disks with limited memory and couldn't contain a lot of content so difficulty was used to increase playtime.

The only reason I go to Reddit anymore are the credible defense megathreads. It is the last subreddit that has not been taken over by partisan botfarms pushing an agenda.