Get Rid of Tutorials, Please
Product manager after product manager repeats the mantra that the first-time user experience (FTUE) is crucial. And yet there's a remarkably simple way to test whether this belief is true: remove it. Almost no one is willing to try, and I suspect it's because they're afraid of the answer. Hiding behind the idea that no one is retaining in your game because players simply don't understand it is a convenient excuse. Get rid of tutorials, please.
The PM's view of metrics tells a similar story. Teams obsess over FTUE completion rate, an endogenous variable! Define "app open" as FTUE, and congratulations, you've achieved 100% completion. If you want to know whether your FTUE works, D1 retention is the actual test. Did players come back after the on-rails stopped holding their hands?
This fixation on completion has warped mobile. Midcore and 4X have become a slugfest, with the first 40 to 50 taps preventing players from exploring the experience. It's an obsession with teaching players what to press rather than how to play. When I talked about PhD psychologists chained to surveys in games, it's exactly this that they should be doing instead: figuring out the best design to teach players how to play, rather than what buttons to press.
The good news is that Match3 has gotten to the point where they simply drop players in for level and ask them to start matching. The "learning by doing" approach is something PC/Console advanced far more. Kim Swift's legendary talk "Our Journey From Narbacular Drop To Portal", and Asher Vollmer's "Prime, Teach, Observe: Tutorializing Innovative Mechanics" echo the same ethos.
Economically, we need to model tutorials as a cost. Learning requires cognitive effort, and while there are payoffs, we make sure those payoffs come. Explicit rewards are not enough. It's really intrinsic rewards that should be front and center of a successful tutorial completion. At game start, players have no idea what extrinsic rewards are worth. They might have some priors based on other games, but it can be tough to rely on them outside of gacha-style 4X characters.
Instead of trying to do this, Mid-Core and 4X have created entirely fake funnels of casual gameplay that actually achieve the learning by doing approach. There's a lot of money out there for a team that can reinvent what the early part of the 4X and mid-core funnel looks like.