As a game developer, I'd explain this as follows: the whole gaming industry has been following the same path towards casualness. Arrows in FPS games telling you where to go, auto adjusting difficulty, forgiving aiming, tons of quick save checkpoints, the list goes on.

The majority of players prefer these be in place - otherwise, why keep doing it? But there's still a significant segment of the market that pines for the day when games really kicked you in the ass.

So enter DayZ, and some psycho player with an Axe chases you while playing a creepy loop of a seven year old girl singing, and exploits bugs to kill you completely unfairly, there's a small but significant number of players that will fall in love with a game like that.

But you're not going to convert even a large share of Black Ops 2 players with that experience. It would be like making every car an Ariel Atom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yldW2FXy7IY

I'm interested in how the hardcore-casual Black Ops 2 market (if we can call it that) was created. It didn't seem by mistake. I remember essentially seeing its rise around the release of the Xbox and Halo. Suddenly real multiplayer FPS gaming was available on a console, but lots of stuff changed too. It wasn't the multiplayer of QuakeWorld. It was something different.

On the other hand, a lot of games now are large and diverse with hours worth of content/art, instead of 5 minutes of content constant replayed for hours until the button patterns are memorized.

Gran Turismo (first version, on Playstation one) was hard. It was good, but it was hard.

Later versions (GT4 especially) were much easier, with many more races and tracks and cars. But is it more fun? Is it fun for advanced players to grind through easy races? (even with weird features to increase difficulty and earnings from races?)

DayZ, yes. The problem however is that its so unbalanced that it destroys the game for so many. I've played it a reasonable amount and actually uninstalled it for now. Some day. Just not now.

Minecraft, no. The majority of Minecraft players have actually never been ganked. It happens, but it isn't a critical part of the game. I've played 50+ hours of Minecraft MP and never been ganked. Fell in lava, but never ganked.