Hardcore gamer = someone who plays only cinematic grizzed white dude games and/or military fetishizing FPS
Casual gamer = anyone that is not a 15-25 yo male, and/or plays anything outside of the previously mentioned games, especially if those games are colorful.
So basically the gaming community is full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery. They make sure they're the loudest voice heard when anything about games is talked about, and won't be happy until all games a homogenous stream of bland, hyper-realistic but with a grey filter slog of mindless action with no heart or soul. And don't you dare force them to read any dialogue or story.
We already solved this problem in the 90s. The solution is to design a hard game but also have cheat codes to make the game easier (or even harder). But most modern game developers are completely allergic towards adding a simple god mode or infinite ammo code into their shitty game, so we're stuck with arguing over whether story mode is good or not (it's good if you insist on not having cheat codes).
This is so wack to me. Every game should be like Jedi Academy, and have a console where you can spawn in any NPC in the game/give yourself any cheat power you can imagine, because all that stuff ever does is make the game more fun.
Currently playing Noita and I have to say that "diagetic cheat codes" are by far my favorite way of doing this
Yeah you could just enter the console command for infinite health or install an infinite health mod, and those should both also be available
But when you're allowed within the normal rules of the game to build an incredibly janky and dangerous item that spawns the enemy that drops a heart container when killed, with lots of opportunity to accidentally explode yourself along the way, that just hits different
that would cut into their microtransaction profits
people won't want to buy the "time-savers" (in enormous quotes) if they can just put in the konami code