Case study
The players who never reach your game
The full write-up: the 420 who never paid, what the skip changed, and the figures we left out for being underpowered.
← All case studies
Also as a PDF · 155 KB
The situation
Acquisition spend is committed before a player reaches anything you built. Players who stall in onboarding have already cost what they cost.
What we found
1 in 5
new players stuck in the tutorial
Zero
of the 420 ever paid anything
Of the 420 players in the stuck group, the number who ever made a purchase was zero.
What the intervention did
19.9% → 12.3%
stuck rate after a skip option
1 in 13
of every install rescued
Median time through onboarding fell about 20%, from 17.3 to 14 minutes. The slowest quartile fell from 118 minutes to 51. Retention was flat from day 1 through day 30, with no measurable cost to ad or pack revenue.
Where monetisation begins
The test located the exact scripted moment the game first asks for money. Completion falls from 88% to 62% at the first gacha pull, the single largest cliff in the funnel.
What we are not claiming
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. The rescue rate is the claim.
Client identifying details removed. Figures are those cleared for external use; where a result is not statistically powered it is described as such rather than quoted. [email protected]
← All case studies