# How Difficult Is It?

> A community-driven platform for rating the difficulty of video games.

How Difficult Is It (howdifficultisit.com) aggregates player-submitted difficulty ratings for video games on a 1–10 scale. Players rate games based on their own experience, and the site combines those ratings into a community consensus difficulty score. The more ratings a game has, the more reliable its score. Games need at least 5 ratings to appear in the ranked listings.

The site covers thousands of games across all platforms and genres. Users can search and filter by title, genre, platform, and release year. Registered users can rate games, leave comments, add tags, create wishlists, and maintain a favourites list.

## Key Pages

- [Home / Game Search](https://howdifficultisit.com/): Search and browse all rated games. Filter by genre, platform, release year, and game type.
- [Difficulty Rankings](https://howdifficultisit.com/rankings): Ranked list of games by community difficulty score, filterable by genre, platform, and year.
- [Articles](https://howdifficultisit.com/articles): In-depth articles about game difficulty, including analyses of specific titles and genres.
- [Upcoming Games](https://howdifficultisit.com/upcoming): Games releasing soon that players can watch for future ratings.
- [Announcements](https://howdifficultisit.com/announcements): Site news and feature updates.
- [About](https://howdifficultisit.com/about): What the site is and how it works.
- [Contact](https://howdifficultisit.com/contact): How to reach the team to report issues or suggest games.

## Game Pages

Each game has its own page at `/game/[gameId]` containing:
- Community difficulty score (1–10 scale)
- Number of ratings and score distribution
- Platform, genre, release year, and developer metadata
- Player comments and discussion
- Community-submitted tags describing the type of difficulty
- External store links (Steam, Amazon, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, etc.)

## Data Model

- Difficulty is rated on a 1–10 scale (1 = very easy, 10 = extremely hard)
- Scores are averaged across all submitted ratings
- Games require a minimum of 5 ratings to appear in rankings
- Tags describe the nature of difficulty (e.g. "skill-based", "rng", "punishing", "grind-heavy")
- Each user can submit one rating per game