On whether games “should” have easy modes

I’m always frustrated when I see the difficulty debate framed as “Should every game have an easy mode?” To me, this question makes about as much sense as “Should every building have an accessibility ramp?”

Every house I’ve ever lived in has had at least one step up to the front door, sometimes a few. None of them have had ramps. And that’s fine - the people who went into and out of those houses frequently would not have benefited from a ramp, and the cases where someone did need assistance with the steps were so few and far between that it was just easier and cheaper to deal with them individually. Other houses that are, say, occupied by people who use wheelchairs have a different trade-off. So it makes sense to let each such household decide whether to install a ramp based on who is using the house rather than mandating it. The households for whom it’s a net benefit will do so without being forced, and the households for whom it isn’t would lose value if they were forced to spend money, space, and time on something that doesn’t help them out.

But there are also buildings intended to be used by much broader and more diverse groups of people: apartment buildings, hospitals, town halls, libraries, museums, department stores, and plenty more. These buildings aren’t specifically meant for people who need ramps - but they are meant for a group of people that includes them. It would be bad business for them and bad practice for society if these buildings did not have accessibility ramps.

This is similar to how I feel about things like easy modes (and of course accessibility features and other things that feed into audience size). When I play a niche indie game made by a tiny low-budget team, I might find it personally disappointing if it doesn’t have an easy mode, and that might be enough to mean that the game isn’t for me. But that’s okay. It doesn’t mean the studio made a mistake. It means they are using their limited resources to target a specific audience as best they can, and I just don’t happen to be a part of it.

But when there’s a game that’s aiming for mass appeal (especially AAA games, but really any game with nontrivial marketing) that doesn’t have an easy mode - I again might be personally disappointed and conclude I’m not in the audience for it, but it also starts to seem more like an actual mistake on the part of the studio. Easy modes are one of the cheapest ways you can substantially broaden a game’s potential audience.

“Should every game have an easy mode?” is an impossible question to answer sensibly unless you can unpack that “should” and that “every”. I think the world would be a worse place if we had, say, an actual law that all games must have easy modes. But some games “should” have easy modes in that choosing to add them would be a win for both the game studio and the people who’d like to play the game. There “should” be easy modes in that you’d expect to see most games that want to sell well to have one. Asking whether “every” game “should” have an easy mode is a false dichotomy that just prompts people to yell at each other because some have examples of games that are better off with easy modes and some have examples of games that are better off without them.