\u201cItchie\u201d, a Japanese programmer and producer who used to work at game companies like Square and SNK, recently took to X to reflect on a fallacy that tripped him up earlier in his career as a developer. The post has since set off a discussion about tutorials in games \u2013 especially gamers\u2019 inherent dislike of them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBack when I was developing mobile games,\u201d Itchie wrote, \u201cI once noticed a high player dropout rate, and suspecting that players were getting stuck during the tutorial, I decided to add extra explanations. However, after closely examining logs, I realized that players were barely reading the instructions in the first place. The reason for the high dropout wasn\u2019t because people didn\u2019t understand, it was because they were made to wait too long without getting to touch the controls.\u201d Upon realizing this, Itchie revised the game\u2019s instructions and shortened the tutorial section by 30 seconds, which led to a visible improvement in player retention. <\/p>\n\n\n\n