I mean . . . I stand by both companies rights to release their games however they want, but as a super fan of both series I thought you might enjoy my perspective on why I think there should be a hard mode in Pokémon, but no easy mode in Dark Souls.

We'll go with Dark Souls first. Dark Souls is weirdly a social game where a community of players tackle the game "together" and when they talk there is a unifying feel that everyone has overcome the same challenges to earn the same rewards. It creates these para social shared memories of challenges we can all commiserate about. Also, the challenge of Souls is kind of core to the experience it's trying to evoke. It wants players to feel like they overcame adversity through persistence. If you played a Souls game on easy and just steam rolled everything it would feel hollow and pointless. You wouldn't be experiencing the world through the lens the developer intended.

As for Pokémon, the reason I think that there should be a hard mode, is because they created an amazing turn based combat system that the game never requires you to use to win. When playing Sword and Shield I was able to beat the entire game with a Wooloo I caught in the first zone, just spamming normal moves, and this gives me an experience like the experience I would imagine easy Dark Souls would be like. I never have to interface with the systems in a meaningful way, so it's boring and pointless. That being said I don't know that I would want a hard mode to select at the beginning of the game. I would want it to be in the world somewhere. Like maybe a second run through the league after you beat it. I still think a game like Pokémon benefits from having one static game world between all players.