It needs to be mentioned that review scores are hugely biased towards hardcore experiences because most reviewers are “gamers” in the hardcore sense. They play games as much as any hardcore and they need a difficult game to be challenged. Its not the reviewer’s fault, you can’t help to get good at something with a lot of practice. But because of this, casual games are often poorly rated by reviewers since the reviewer finds them too easy.

Reviewers are writing the reviews for their audience, which in general are hardcore gamers, and there is nothing wrong with this. Hardcore players need hardcore reviewers. The only downside to this happening is that there aren’t enough casual review sites out there and thats because on the whole, casual players don’t read review sites. This means that metacritic ends up being a rating system that favours hard games, and its hard for any casual player to read a review at their level.

Carless is right in saying that we shouldn’t throw out difficulty in games just to appease the casual crowd. And it is a good thing that there is a much wiser approach to difficult content now – designers are removing the accessibility problems and focusing on simple concepts that get hard. But lets not confuse “hard” with “good”. A casual player will never enjoy a simple game that is made very hard. They don’t want an involved in-depth experience that requires weeks of practice – they want easily accesible games that are also not that challenging. Hard and good are both very subjective terms.