Why Do People Enjoy Challenging Games? (And Five You Can Try Today!)
Challenging games are becoming more and more popular within the gaming community. Many games like Dark Souls, Ninja Gaiden, and Super Meat Boy have earned worldwide popularity by being extremely challenging games to beat or complete. But the question remains, why are people gravitating towards and enjoying hard games?
There are many reasons why players are enjoying harder games and included in these reasons are some of the following:
- The aspects of problem-solving, strategizing, and overcoming challenges are thoroughly enjoyable traits in a game. Players enjoy being able to use and improve upon a multitude of skills.
- To test their limits. It is enjoyable to test your limits and see what you can accomplish. Hard games provide just this; a way to put your skills to the test and see how far you can go.
- Hard games are more satisfying and rewarding. If a game is harder, it tends to give players more of a satisfying and rewarding feeling if they complete, or get a high score in it.
- Hard games force players to learn and adapt quickly. Hard games force people to learn more skills, like time management, reaction timing and more. Such
- Bragging rights. People like to be able to compare high scores with their friends. By beating such a hard game, a game that others are unable to compete; gives a person bragging rights.
But… do people really enjoy hard games over easy games? Here is a case study on hard games vs easy games
No Humanity case study
One of our games, No Humanity, which is branded as the hardest game. Players are occasionally complaining the game is too hard. We decided to run an A/B test, to find out if making the game easier may help the player retention. We swapped an easier world, Laser Challenge (only lasers and no bullets and bosses), as the first world. Unsurprisingly, the day 1 retention dropped around 4% on average:
Version 6.1.5 with the easier world is having 4% lower retention to the original version.
Although that doesn’t look much, imagine when you have 10k new players a day, 400 players dropped out on the second day because they don’t think the game is challenging enough.
For retention by countries,
We have a similar but slightly different result:
South Korea is 11% more engaged in other countries, followed by Russian and Japan. Most western players are not that into the hardcore games.
Now that you know why people love playing such hard games, here are 5 of the hardest and most popular ‘challenging’ games:
1. Dark Souls
Dark souls definitely earn their spot on this list. It is as rewarding as it is punishing, and it provides a great challenge for players.
2. Dota 2
Dota 2 has a very high skill requirement in order to play at a ‘good’ level. It’s a very intense game as it includes micromanaging your own character, synchronizing with teammates, and improving personal skills.
3. No Humanity
This is a bit of a different one. No Humanity is a mobile game, and it’s dubbed as the ‘hardest game’. No Humanity compiles reaction time, strategy, memory, and much more in order to succeed.
4. Ghosts and Goblins
Ghosts n’ Goblins is a very random, difficult, and almost impossible game to beat. Enemies swipe at you from unimaginable directions, and it requires players to learn and improve upon multiple skills.
5. Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels
This is a game that was perceived so difficult, that it wasn’t even released outside of Japan. This game is very difficult due to its assumption of mastery of the previous Mario games, as well as many other additions like impossible bosses, hard-to-get weapons, and many more obstacles.
So…What’s stopping you from picking up one of these games and starting to love challenging games yourself?
