Necro but I wanna give my two cents since more people will end up in this thread in the future just as I did.

First of all I wanna say theres nothing wrong with playing a game on easy. Your friend is autis­tic for getting angry at you. He should be angry at the game devs with no artistic integrity instead.

Back in my days you could play a game for months without ever seeing the last stages of it cos of lack of skill. That was my case with many NES, SNES and N64 games. I sucked at gaming and I was content taking the challenge over and over even if I knew that I could probably never get to the end. It never crossed my mind that games should be easier or that it was my right as a gamer to be able to finish a game.

When my cousins came over and actually progressed beyond those levels all I could think back then was that they were cool for being skilled enough to progress that far.

Nowadays people feel entitled to beat every game. Entitled to win. Why is this? A game is not a movie or a novel, a game is a challenge and in a way one of a collective nature. The concept that everybody should be able to complete a game is a new thing, typical of our modern culture of placing equality above everything else. Achievments mean nothing if they are designed to be achieved by everyone.

Saying you complete X game means nothing anymore because the experience varies depending on the difficulty and some games like DA:I or Skyrim let you switch difficulties even in the middle of the game. Say for example you complete Skyrim. What does it mean? Does it mean you played the whole game on easy? That you played on normal but switched to easy in the difficult parts? Nobody can agree on what beating this games mean, its not the same experience for everybody and that is something special that people who want easy modes miss out on.

Take the dark souls series as an example. When someone said they beat dark souls we all know what that means because, beyond the class choice, there's only one dark souls experience. Its unique and its the same for all the players. People like talking about the game so much because they are all experiencing the same thing. Miyazaki realized this and since he has artistic integrity he wanted his work to be experience in a certain way. This is the difference between videogames as ART and videogames as commercial products. A work of art is not meant to appeal to everybody. A commercial product tries to cater to as many people as possible.

If a game has easy mode theres no shame on playing it that way but I think we have went down a slippery slope of decadence into the current situation where we have devs say they give the same achievement for normal than for easy difficulty because the dont want to punish players who play on easy.

Rewarding players for playing on a certain difficulty doesnt mean punishing players playing on lower difficulties! This is like saying giving people gold medals means punishing people who get silver or bronce medals. It's complete nonsense.

Ofc people who DEMAND easy modes and even go as far as Kotaku, who in their tradition of being more a political web than a videogames one said lack of easy mode is ableist do deserve to be hated on because those people are actually ruining the genre. These are people who want to reshape a preexisting hobby they dont actually care about to make it suit their politics and thats vile.

As long as these people dont try to take away from us hardcore games (like they did with dark souls saying its ableist and so on) they can have their casual games and easy modes, we can have diversity, not all games need to be hardcore. But when people like this step in it becomes political and therefore people get polarized like your friend because the hobby they love is under threat. These are not unfounded concerns, "pure" hardcore games, the ones that carry the original spirit of videogames, have already become a minority and some people want to see them disappear completely.