like, by volume, very few players actually want experiences with that level of difficulty. if there was telemetry, i’d be fascinated to know how many Celeste Spring 2020 Collab players never beat a single Grandmaster lobby level but still got all the berries in the first 3 lobbies or something. (this is where i am at currently, for reference — though in large part due to my technical struggles with Celeste’s controls at high level, which are too complex to expound upon here.) so when these kinds of challenges are created, i always see them created in the context of an existing playerbase that they know will eagerly eat up their work and in return give honest feedback and often even playthrough footage (though that’s usually created in large part for the other market of people who cannot fathom approaching such challenges themselves but enjoy seeing them bested by others).
this begs the question: if you create such a thing without being part of such a community (which i would say necessitates this work not being a mod/custom level of an existing game like many kaizo‐hard experiences are), will players be motivated to engage with it? that is to say, how much of the engagement with kaizo‐hard game design comes from community engagement rather than appreciation of the game itself? the only other game coming to mind for me is Dustforce, which launched with just one kaizo‐hard map (Giga Difficult) but added 8 more in an update — including one that’s so difficult its SS rank seems to rival Celeste’s chapter 9 golden berry in difficulty, and which the devs decided to exclude from the level select entirely (requiring basically a cheat code to access at all). the game’s very good and eventually gathered its own community, but it’s pretty clear that its origin was in the Melee‐adjacent platform fighter community.
like, it just doesn’t seem like this kind of art would ever form in a vacuum. i don’t know how you would isolate this as a want that anyone has without just exposing them to something kaizo‐hard and seeing if it sticks. this would track with my understanding that the first kaizo‐hard predecessors were done more as jokes/trolls than anything else, before people gradually started to take them more seriously both from the performance and the design perspectives.
(this train of thought prompted by Patricia Taxxon’s thoughts from playing all of SC2020. at the end she calls on designers to try making their games harder than Celeste, which i evidently have mixed feelings about.)