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One in five new players was stuck in the tutorial, and worth exactly nothing
Of the 420 players trapped there, none ever paid. A skip button rescued one install in thirteen.
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You pay for a player before they reach anything you built. If they stall in onboarding, that money is already spent.
We ran a randomised test on 6,319 new US iOS players to find out how many were stuck, what they were worth, and what happened if we let them out.
How many, and what they were worth
1 in 5
new players stuck in the tutorial
There were 420 players in that group. None of them ever paid anything.
What a skip button did
The stuck rate fell from 19.9% to 12.3%, better than a third.
1 in 13
of every install rescued
Players also got through faster, about 20% on the median, 17.3 minutes down to 14. The slowest quarter went from 118 minutes to 51.
Where the game starts asking for money
The test located the exact scripted beat where monetisation begins. Completion falls from 88% to 62% at the first gacha pull. Most games have a cliff like that somewhere; few studios can point at it precisely enough to argue about.
What we are leaving out
Player value and revenue per install also moved in the right direction. We are not quoting those numbers. There were roughly fifty payers per arm, nowhere near enough to power them, and we would rather publish a rescue rate that survives scrutiny than a revenue figure that does not. Retention was flat from day 1 through day 30, and the change cost nothing in ad or pack revenue.
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