This is why games suck now. 'Make a game easy' is what you do when you can't design good gameplay mechanics that work at multiple skill levels. If your game ca

This is why games suck now. 'Make a game easy' is what you do when you can't design good gameplay mechanics that work at multiple skill levels. If your game can only work at one skill level, you have to make that skill level really easy if you want to keep as many people as you can playing it after their first try. The downside is that there is no reward for improving at the game. You play it a few times, and you do not improve. There's no newer corners of the game to explore, no new approaches to playing it. Some games are so good that you can re-release them over and over for years with just a few changes and maybe some new content, and people will keep buying and playing it. Tetris. Puyo-puyo. Super Mario. Those are the games you should try to idolize, not games like Gears of War or Halo or random-indie-game-that-wishes-it-were-Braid #455321. You can brute-force a game that sells a lot by playtesting it with countless focus groups, paying Hollywood-level for game assets, and marketing it to death on Gamespot and whatever, but that's the equivalent of hiring a giant workforce and grinding out your web app in some old Java enterprise WebPortletComponentModelerFactory thing. Be agile, try small fun stuff and wander around until you get something that's fun to play, and then think up a way to make a full game out of it. Don't start the other way around, with the desire for 'some game' but no way to fill it out with the fun part. Addendum: Don't be afraid to let the player die. That's why there are multiple lives (if your game works like that, I mean.) Most games I see today go as far as possible to prevent a player from dying during normal gameplay, to the point where you can clear many games on your first try without any sort of negative feedback -- Assassin's Creed 2, for example. To learn to play Super Mario Bros., you had to die or watch someone else die. If you're setting out from the beginning in your design with "I never want the player to die", then just don't have lives and death at all, like Braid. It's ridiculous when you have a lives system in a game but contort your game mechanics to never use it. You end up creating an environment where a player never really gets negative feedback on when to not do something, and you have to constantly push them in the right direction with obvious and uncouth hints in order to prevent them from making an 'accident'. You're preventing your player from learning. Stop it!