I have played 150 hours of Battlefield 6 since release. The game is decent, but the players are fascinating.
Losing in a competitive game is painful. To cope, the human brain invents “ego protection”—a rationalization for why the loss wasn’t your fault. As a Chinese gamer living in the US, I have noticed that this rationalization changes depending on your culture.
“Hardcore” is a vague term. It can mean “simulation,” but in this context, I mean “skill gap.”
Think of games as a spectrum. On one end, you have Coin Flipping: pure luck, zero skill. On the other, you have Quake or Chess: pure skill, zero luck. In Quake, a master will beat a novice 100% of the time. It is raw and unfiltered.
Battlefield sits in the middle. It has a skill gap—good players consistently win—but it includes enough chaos for the ego to hide. When the average player loses, they need a reason.
When an American player gets outplayed by an advanced movement technique (like a slide-jump), they usually attack the game’s design.
They say, “That shouldn’t be in Battlefield; it is too much like Call of Duty.” They argue that holding an angle should be the superior tactic, and that movement exploits are “unrealistic.”
This is denial. If we removed these movement skills, the game would stagnate. Attacking would become impossible because the defender would always win. But the player would rather believe the game is broken than admit they were too slow to track the target.
Chinese players rarely blame the design. They blame the integrity. There is a saying in the Chinese community: “When in doubt, report first.”
When a Chinese player is killed by someone faster and more accurate, they instantly assume the opponent is hacking. Unfortunately, this is often a rational assumption. having administered servers for both regions, I saw a 10-to-1 ratio of hackers in China versus the US.
The Chinese gaming scene is a low-trust environment. In a low-trust environment, high skill is indistinguishable from cheating. But the psychological result is the same as the American version: “I didn’t lose because I am bad. I lost because the game was unfair.”
Gamers today are softer than they were ten years ago. But this isn’t just a cultural shift; it is an economic one.
The Business Model: Previously, games were products. You paid $60, and the transaction ended. Developers could afford to make games hard. Today, games are services. Companies live on engagement metrics. If a player feels defeated, they churn. To protect revenue, the developer must ensure the positive feedback never stops.
The Demographic: The average gamer is no longer a geek who enjoys tinkering. He is an employee with a 9-to-5 job and a TikTok attention span. He has thirty minutes to play. He wants a dopamine hit, not a struggle.
This is why I respect studios like Larian (Baldur’s Gate 3) or Warhorse (Kingdom Come: Deliverance). They reject the service model. They take the risk of making difficult, finite masterpieces. In an industry optimizing for retention, making a game where the player can actually fail is a radical act.