Why Players Quit Your Tutorial, and How to Fix It
Players quit a tutorial at the step that stops making sense, so count who passes each step and how long they spend on it. A step that loses far more people than its neighbours is nearly always unclear, not too hard.
How do you spot the step that loses people?
Beekeeper Station is an invented game, and these numbers are made up for this example. Its tutorial has five steps, and 120 sessions started it.
| Step | Players | Went on | Lost here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start | 120 | ||
| Walk to the hive | 114 | 95% | 6 |
| Pick up the smoker | 109 | 96% | 5 |
| Calm the bees | 71 | 65% | 38 |
| Collect the honey | 68 | 96% | 3 |
| Sell a jar | 66 | 97% | 2 |
Four steps lose 2 to 6 people each. That is the ordinary trickle of people who were only looking, and you will never get it to zero. One step loses 38, more than all the others together, which come to 16.
Is 65% a real number or a bad afternoon? With 109 players, the true share is very likely between 56% and 73%. The ranges of the other steps all start at 88% or higher, so this gap is real.
Now add time. Those who got past "Calm the bees" spent a middle of 18 seconds on it. Those who left stayed a middle of 70 seconds first. Nobody leaves after 70 seconds because they are bored of a tutorial step. They leave because they tried and it did not work.
The step says "Hold the smoker near the hive". Everyone taps instead of holding, so nothing happens and nothing tells them why. The game had no way to fail that step and no way to skip it. Drawn as a diagram, the step is a room with no door.
How do you fix that step?
- Fix that one step. Do not rewrite the tutorial.
- Show, do not tell. More text is the usual reaction and rarely the cure. Make the smoker puff at a tap, and let holding do it better.
- React to wrong moves. After a few wrong tries, the game should show what to do. Silence reads as broken.
- Teach one new thing per step. If a step needs a new button and a new idea, split it.
- Let people skip. Someone who knows the genre should not be trapped.
Then measure again. If that step goes from 65% to 85%, that is about 73 players per version to tell it from luck. If you do not have them, playing it with five people tells you nearly as much here, because the failure is so loud.
One honest limit: 66 of 120 finished, which is 55%, and that sounds low. But a share of finishers says little by itself, since you do not know what is normal for a game like yours. Your own trickle, the 5% at the good steps, is the fairest thing to compare with.
The first steps of a game carry the most weight, as nobody who leaves here will see what you built. Where players quit shows the same reading for a whole game.
Paste this to your AI
Help me fix the tutorial of my game. The event log is in [file or folder].
1. Draw the tutorial as a Mermaid state diagram: each step, what the player must do to pass, what happens after a wrong move, and how to skip it. Mark any step with no way forward except the right input. Use get_recipe with state-machine-check if Spielerando is connected, to find states with no way out.
2. Use get_recipe with drop-off-funnel, or count yourself, for each step: players who reached it, share who went on, 95% range.
3. For the worst step, compare the middle time spent by those who passed with those who left. Show both numbers and how many players each rests on.
4. Tell me what the step asks for, in the exact words on screen, and what most players did instead, if the log shows it.
Suggest one small change to that step, not a new tutorial. Prefer doing to reading. If the log cannot show why people leave, say so and tell me what to watch for when someone plays. If fewer than 30 reached the step, do not draw a conclusion.
Or skip this and connect the MCP: your AI then finds all of this by itself.Connect the MCP
How to check it worked
- Give it to someone new. Say nothing, and sit on your hands.
- Do it wrong on purpose. Tap, mash, walk away. Does the game answer?
- Time the step. Those who pass should not take much longer than before.
- Press skip. You should land somewhere that works, with everything the tutorial would have given you.
- Check the steps next to it. Fixing one should not simply move the loss one step on.