Does a game have to be difficult for it to be fun or do I just not get it?

Nah it doesn't have to be difficult to be fun. I don't like when a game feels like work either. And I get frustrated easily like @endel .

But I also like games that I feel completely lost in at first, with steep learning curves, like when I first started playing master of orion 2 or crusader kings 2. I like the challenge of vaguely figuring out the rules and patterns until I can play the game by intuition. But I very much like taking my time, so turn-based or pausable single player games are for me.

Maybe it's just the challenges we like are different? Speed, skill, or understanding. And I'm sure there are plenty more.
And that not all of us want challenges all the time, like @Greater thunder said.

 

You're overthinking it.

Why people enjoy it? Because it's FUN! People have different ways of having fun.

As for me it's the feeling after conquering the game with hardships involved it's simply exhilarating which cannot be compared to casual games..

 

nope, as long as it fits your taste, it will be fun, i'm playing old ROTK XI again currently

 

I like games like story of seasons and stardew valley: stat building, hoarding and human stories. Can't say I have ever enjoyed battle games. I've given up on a lot of puzzle, battle or horror games, but I've played guild wars 2 and likes the community enough to regularly come back. I'm also playing this trash game where I'm doing nothing but grinding and hoarding to unlock characters. I've been playing for 1 year, nothing changes, they just keep squeezing us for money in exchange for gatcha, but I keep playing because I want to collect all the characters.

Arknights, Evol x Love, Mystic Messenger, Genshin Impact are recently enjoying success. From what I heard, their gameplays are not very hard. So people also like games that don't have insane difficulty.

that reminds me of a thread someone made about MC in novel making a game purposely hard just to lose money. I think there's a market for hard games, but firstly it needs to be a world you can immerse yourself in. Even in stardew valley, people spend time trying to beat journey of the prairie king (I just gave up )

 

In Ai-chan's opinion, 'fun' is directly relative to your enjoyment of the media. Some people think conversing and learning new things is fun. Some people think it's a chore.

In Ai-chan's case, Ai-chan thinks that games are medias for releasing your stress. Therefore, the games Ai-chan would play would be least complicated, fast-paced and wouldn't tax the brain too much. For that reason, Candy Crush is fine, but the overly complex puzzle detective games are not. Similarly RTS games are great, but not so great if they have a lot of unskippable cutscenes, which is why Ai-chan likes Galactic Civilizations and hates Master of Orion (the new one). In the same vein, extremely grindy games are not fine for Ai-chan, which means Life Is Feudal MMO is completely out but Starsector and FFIV are fine.

Like you, Ai-chan doesn't like playing games that becomes work. A game is there to be enjoyed after a good day's work. If if becomes work, Ai-chan would rather do actual work. At least with real work, money comes in. With games that feel like work, you bleed real world money.

It's also why Ai-chan doesn't play real-time persistent MMOs like Tribal Wars or Game of Thrones anymore because at some point, you have to sacrifice sleep and rest to avoid your kingdom from being destroyed during the 4-6 hours you're away from the game. In turn, your real life work suffers.