Chris Gaerig responds to discussions on Gameological about difficulty—namely in Spider-Man games—with a rather unique take:

[Contemporary video games], then, are not easier because that’s what the industry demands. They’re easier because they canbe while remaining engaging. Moveover, the design goals of games have changed. Arcades are dying or, more accurately, dead, so allowance eaters have been banished from the landscape. Instead, contemporary games put as much emphasis on telling/experiencing a story as they do on fighting your way through it, hence the preponderance of RPGs (Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Skyrim, Fallout, etc). If you’re looking for an empirically challenging video game experience in 2012, feel free to join in the Call of Duty epidemic or explore any of the myriad games being played competitively; AI will never be an adequate substitute for dedicated, thinking humans.

Gaerig, Chris. “The evolution of technology and its effect on game difficulty” (June 29, 2012) <http://themodernthings.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/the-evolution-of-technology-and-its-effect-on-game-difficulty/>.