If you're not dying at least once or twice every time you play a game it's too easy. Resident Evil demonstrated this to me (the early games). One of the most perfectly balanced games between challenging thoughtful puzzles and survival combat skills. Especially for kids/youth.

This theory could go a long way in explaining the slow death of World of Warcraft. Blizzard can make as much end-game content as they want but the fact remains that the average new player starting out is faced with 12 years worth of content that is so ridiculously easy that there's a very real chance they will go through it all without dying once.

Those not dying at least once have clearly never experienced the wonder that's auto-matchmaking 5-man instance dungeons.

If anything, WoW's big problem is that an average new player starting out is faced with 12 years worth of content they have to rush through to get to max level endgame, where the vast majority of in-game social life occurs. The innate incentives of experiencing the storyline and zones doesn't compete favorably with the huge social incentive of wanting to join your friends at endgame as quickly as possible.

In WoW, just any zone-leveled game, old content quickly becomes obsolete once it's superseded with newer content, and only delivers a fraction of its original value.

Pokemon GO doesn't have this problem (for the simple reason of tying their in-game geography to real-world geography), but also has a very shallow gameplay where the novelty will wear off quickly. If they can expand gameplay mechanics quickly before players abandon it, they may have a sustained hit.

> Those not dying at least once have clearly never experienced the wonder that's auto-matchmaking 5-man instance dungeons.

urm, tanks can solo the 5 man dungeons, so it doesnt really matter what the rest of the group does anymore...

JRPG's yes, roguelikes no (or at least not the "pure" ones like ADOM, Brogue, DCSS, Nethack, etc. which have permadeath and require a good deal of skill).

Maybe you meant MMORPGs and JRPGs? Because MMORPGs tend to fit to that template.

I mean the grind "RPG without a plot" such as Diablo where there's only difficulty when you hit a level cap or you try to rush the game, but for most players it's "grind until you're OP then kill boss".