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The problem comes in the design phase of the game. The developers aim the game at “Bob”s in the customer base and then later add difficulty, usually by tweaking the HP, or maybe the hit boxes. Or they might lower the number of recharging drops. What they don’t do is create a hard game for Alice alongside an easy game for Bob. Alice no longer has a game designed ground up to be challenging in a thoughtful way. She gets the easy version gameplay - one that might well not really require strategic decisions or foresight or grinding. She just has to mash the attack button more often than Bob.
I'll admit that's a trend, especially in the AAA open world design space, but I don't see why things have to be that way. There are plenty of other games where they're still designed for Alice, then Bob is thrown a bone by cranking his modifiers up and his enemy's modifiers down until he can faceroll it.
If you still need the Bobs to think the game is designed for them since they're your biggest market segment, just do what Bungie did for Halo 3: design your game around the "Heroic" mode, then rename your "Easy" mode to "Normal" so the Bobs don't feel insulted.
For a slightly more recent example, that's how the Owlcat Pathfinder games work as well. "Core" / "Challenging" utilizes the actual rules for the system, while "Normal" gives the player a variety of cheats to smooth out the experience.
I don't feel insulted by "here's the baby hand-holding easy mode for you pathetic chumps what can't play properly" mode at all, since I am a pathetic chump what can't play properly 😀 I'm doing this for fun, not "I am so marvellous!" feelings, though I admit when I finally gave in, consulted a build guide for PoE, and managed to at last get past some of the later Act bosses, it was a great relief. Though even there, it wasn't "Yes, I killed the big boss, I'm so great!", it was "At last I can move on with the rest of the story".
Some people do want to have high kill rates, some people just want the story. I see no reason why there can't be separate modes to accommodate these. (Gosh, I'm really being all irenic and peace'n'love about this, unusual for me!)
More credit to you for it, but often the target audience for these games is teenaged boys who tend to be less comfortable choosing anything easier than Normal (speaking from my personal experience of having once been one). If shifting around how things are named allows devs to target a higher skilled audience with their design while still making money, I'm all for it.
Yeah, teenagers are sensitive around things like that, so if calling the easier mode "Normal" lets them preserve their amour-propre, I won't sneer at them (maybe smile tolerantly). I don't even mind if they invent a super-easy "granny mode" for the likes of me, so the kids can feel "well at least I'm not playing on that level".
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