Why does an optional, opt in easy mode take away the satisfaction of its target audience? You are not required to play it. It is like saying having a gluten free option on the menu takes away the enjoyment of a meal's target audience.
Having a gluten-free option takes away resources from other parts of the restaurant. Considering the fact that gluten allergy can be pretty serious, having gluten-free options means shitload of money spent on making sure there's no cross-contamination. Money that could be invested in better croissants for example.
Anyway, easy modes shift and break the game. It's very visible with GTA for example.
Savehouses in GTA III, VC and SA are very memorable because the game forced you to go there pretty much after every mission to save. In GTA IV we got autosave after each mission plus GPS which means we don't remember shit from what Liberty City looked like and especially we have zero emotional connection to savehouses. Technically you could go back to the savehouse just to save, but really, you didn't. You could turn off GPS in options, but really, you didn't.
There was this one fucking mission in GTA VC where you had to fly a toy aircraft but controls were fucked and after every fail you had to go through this over and over again. It was memorable because it was annoying. In GTA SA there was the famous line
> All we had to do, was follow the damn train, CJ!
As a result of a broken voiceline where Smoke told you to get closer while in fact you needed to get further away. The fact that after each fail we had to do the mission again from the start made it frustrating, but also memorable.
In GTA V we have mission checkpoints. All friction has been removed because general audience hates friction.
It just does. Completing a challenge gives a feeling of achievement. That feeling is lessened if others get the reward of completion without the effort. The Mt. Everest comparison sibling is accurate. If a difficult game had a "skip this hard thing" button on the screen you could press whenever you want, that would be a big turnoff to a lot of players. Dark Souls would never have caught on if it had such a button.
And even if you want to feel superior to others, you can just count them as cheaters and not count their "achievements?" Many games already disable achievements if you turn cheats on already.
On steam, achievements are easily cheated with third-party tools. Which is good, the end game of the alternative is kernel-level anti-cheat for Steam itself.
If senses like satisfaction were fully voluntarily controllable then arguably there would be no need for games in the first place. I feel there's generally more satisfaction from overcoming a well-designed concrete obstacle rather than self-hindering that accomplishes nothing in particular and that could've just been avoided. At the end of the day all challenges in games are artificial and avoidable, but some separation (like having to go into settings, enable cheats, then open dev console to enable godmode, rather than just having a godmode keybind) is good for tricking the brain.
That said, the challenge of the Portal games (outside of challenge modes) is almost entirely in the puzzles rather than fast reflexes, so I don't think a slow-mode would really take away from anything challenge-wise. I'd guess it was just a bit awkward with dialog, and simpler to design puzzles around not requiring fast reactions rather than introduce a new control. In comparison, something like yellow paint giving away the solution definitely would be detrimental, even if you could in theory ignore it.
Also, it's very hard to get multiple difficulty settings right. It's much better to have cheats available to make the experience easier and learn to get better at the game through those.
There are many, many mountains to climb. Some are harder than others. Each doesn't need to have an escalator so everyone can climb it.
Developers have limited time and all features, including accessibility features, take away from that time. There are many games I never beat because they were difficult.
I agree with you that in some sense it undermines the achievement, but tending to the ego of players that feel undermined by the existence of accessibility features is not high in my hierarchy of values personally.
It would not undermine the achievement of reaching the peak by foot.
> Also, it's very hard to get multiple difficulty settings right. It's much better to have cheats available to make the experience easier and learn to get better at the game through those.
Somewhat agree there and I especially dislike "harder" difficulties that just bloat HP to the point of wasting your time. But you can also expose some of those cheats in the setting menu which makes them a kind of difficulty option except its up to the player to choose where they need help and they are not forced to choose between e.g. ultra-tight timing or more reasonable timing but your character also tells you all the solution to logic puzzles if you take more than a second to look at them (non-made up example).