Topic: How much, if at all, does game difficulty affect your Wii U game purchases?

I have a good tolerance for low difficulty only if I'm already biased toward the game (one case being my nostalgia for Pokémon), or if the game is really engaging in some other way such as story or art direction. Then I feel like it's still worth going through to see the parts I like.
I'm fine with high difficulty as long as the game doesn't feel cheap or tiring. When I do beat a well-made, high-difficulty game, it feels seriously rewarding.

Other factors aside, low difficulty bothers me much more than high difficulty, because it just seems boring. Low difficulty is enough to make me avoid buying some games, or wait for sales, whereas high difficulty won't (unless it's unfair, or it's because of bad controls, or it shoves in too much grinding, which is my pet peeve). But ultimately:

I prefer games to have a medium level difficulty the vast majority of the time. Difficult enough to have to try my best but not difficult to the point where I'm frustrated.

Difficulty has a fairly high impact on my game choice, but other things can still sway me into buying a game even if I think it looks too easy or too difficult in a bad way. I find myself buying and focusing on fewer games, with most I'm skipping being in a lower difficulty range.

Very little. You mentioned that you breezed through the levels in all the recent NSMB games, and I think breezing through a title like New Super Mario Brothers 2 is definitely the wrong way to play that game if you intend to get anything more than a "kiddy" vibe from it. With its theme of coin collecting, my experience has been much like my experiences in 3D Mario, in which I'm taking my time to explore the levels for as many coin collecting opportunities as possible. The reward in NSMB2 for me was never really how fast I could beat a level, but just how many coins I could get out of one. That knowledge becomes really valuable when knowing a level's opportunities has to meet efficiency under the time restraints of Coin Rush. I wonder what your thoughts are on a game like Kirby's Epic Yarn? Do you knock it for being easy to complete or did you take the time to explore what you could do in that world? Nintendo's games are mostly for all ages, you can either take it "kiddie" and not even bother getting immersed into an experience or you can explore, get immersed and enable the game to show its maturity.

I am ok with Nintendo games, where it's quite easy to see the ending and then it asks more skills to reach 100%, but after playing Dark Souls games every other actionRPG looks so easy... I'm playing Darksiders 2 now on the hardest setting and I can't stand that stupid mini-map telling me where to go; and you can even fall in a lava pit without losing any health! Dark Souls ruined my life! I wanna die more often, please (thank god there's Platinum Games).

It depends on the game. If its an RPG or an action-adventure game, I'm fine with a lower difficulty level, but action games and platformers are where I go for difficulty. Thank the gods for Platinum Games.

I like both easy and hard games, as long as the gameplay works alongside the difficulty. But difficulty doesn't really affect my interest in games that impressed me before.
But difficulty can be very subjective. Just look at @andreoni79 and his point on Dark Souls - many find it to be very difficult. I, on the other hand, think it's not hard at all, just terribly unbalanced. It depends on the player.

Hi @Kaze_Memaryu! I haven't say a word about Dark Souls being very difficult. I just noticed that after playing "punishing" games, many other games aren't challenging even at hardest setting, and that ruins the whole experience (as for Far Cry 3). I'm replaying Fallout 3 at Very Hard and, thank god, now I have a totally different approach to the game, because I need to use tactics and weapons ignored before (like mines and missiles, while just an assualt rifle was perfect for every enemy at Normal) and this is how it should work. Anyway I'd like to know what you mean with "unbalanced" (consider that I play DS only offline, if it matters).

@andreoni79 Sorry, got that wrong, then. ^_^"'

About the imbalance of Dark Souls: the whole point of its appeal lies within the low margin for error, but at the same time a very unforgiving learning curve. The game doesn't tell you anything about how stats affect certain weapon types, but floods you with a large amount of numbers right away. And it's extremely hard to learn from mistakes when most of them result in instant death.
Funny enough, enemies have extremely lacking AI. Combine that with most enemies prioritizing countering instead of attacking first (except for some Black Knights), and it's extremely simple to master once you understand your position as a weakling. Taking some strategies from a speedrunner (like the Kiln of the Last Flame skip), it took me 2 hours to beat the game, plus one hour learning the timing to parry beforehand. And the only difficult section I encountered was the Ornstein and Smough bossfight, since I wanted to get the Ornstein armor set and tried to kill Smough first.

I'm not saying that Dark Souls is bad, though. I like that it doesn't help anyone, as well as your character never becoming some kind of super soldier. But the game just throws the entire arsenal at you right away to create false tension, since enemies later on never become more challenging.

^ Ok, got it. I soloed both Dark Souls and I looked at guides only for extra stuff after finishing them, but there was no frustration because I felt every death was just my mistake. Let's hope that the next Zelda and Xenoblade X will let us customize difficult or at least the HUD since now we have the gamepad screen too. I can't stand minimap anymore!!!

If the difficulty is below 6 on that 1-10 scale I'm pretty much not going to love a game. I want a challenge when I play a game for the first time, not just after I've finished it.