The $10,000,000 Tutorial: Why Onboarding is Your Most Profitable Mechanic
The Reality: Most AAA studios treat onboarding likea "necessary evil" before the player gets to the "real" game.
They are dead wrong.
Onboarding has customers, not captives
A tutorial assumes the player is trapped until they press “Next.” Onboarding assumes the player is always one friction point away from leaving. The mindset shift is simple but radical:
The “customer” of onboarding is a skeptical, curious player who owes you nothing.
The “job” of onboarding is to get them from “What is this?” to “I get it, and I want more” as fast as possible.
In a world of F2P and subscription services, Onboarding IS the game. If you have a 40% drop-off in the first 10 minutes, you don't have a retention problem; you have a "Value Delivery" problem. You are spending millions to acquire players only to punch them in the face with a wall of text.
The Value Equation of Onboarding
To make onboarding "the best part," you have to manipulate these four variables instantly:
Increase the Dream Outcome: Don't teach them how to "press X to jump." Show them the power-fantasy they bought the game for within the first 30 seconds.
Increase Perceived Likelihood: Give them a "Micro-Win" immediately. Make them feel competent, not like a student in a classroom.
Decrease Time Delay: Get them to the "Aha!" moment (the core fun) faster. If your game is a shooter, they should be shooting something in < 45 seconds.
Decrease Effort & Sacrifice: Stop making them read. If they have to read a paragraph to understand a mechanic, your UX has failed.
Kill the "Manual"
If you need a tooltip to explain a UI element, the UI is broken. Good onboarding uses Environmental Affordances. Use lighting, sound, and level design to "nudge" the player's behavior without them realizing they are being taught.
The "Dopamine Breadcrumb" Trail
Every 60 seconds in the first 10 minutes, the player needs a reward.
Reward 1: Aesthetic (Cool explosion/view).
Reward 2: Mechanical (Unlocked a new move).
Reward 3: Social (A compliment from an NPC or a leaderboard ping).
The Goal: Make the act of learning feel like winning.
Frontload the "Cool"
Most games save the best mechanics for Hour 20. Hormozi would tell you to give them a "taste" of the Max-Level power in the first 5 minutes (The "Metroid" approach). Let them feel what it's like to be a god, then take it away. Now they have a Reason to Grind.
Build it like a product slice
Product teams ship a small, valuable slice and iterate. Onboarding should work the same way. Think in terms of a vertical slice of your game:
Let players perform the core loop (fight, move, build, solve… whatever defines your game) within a few minutes.
Wrap that loop with just enough UI and narrative to make sense, not every system you plan to ship.
Strip away non‑essential features at the start; complexity can be unlocked later when players have context and motivation.
Your onboarding “MVP” is not a wall of pop‑ups. It’s a tiny version of your game where the player can already feel smart, powerful, or curious.
Replace lectures with scaffolding
The worst tutorials lecture players; the best onboarding quietly rigs the world in their favor. Use scaffolding instead of explanation:
Bias early encounters so success is highly likely, even if the player is clumsy.
Use level design, camera framing, and enemy placement to suggest what to do before text ever appears.
When text is needed, tie it tightly to action: one hint, one input, one immediate payoff.
Every time you’re tempted to write three paragraphs, ask: “Can level design, pacing, or UI affordances make this clear instead?”
Make onboarding a living experiment
If onboarding is a product, it has metrics, hypotheses, and updates. That means:
Track key moments: where players quit, where they get stuck, which screen they linger on, which feature they never touch.
Treat changes like experiments: “If we remove this pop‑up and guide with environment cues, do completion rates improve?”
Revisit onboarding when you add big features, change the economy, or shift the target audience. It must evolve with the game, not fossilize.
When the live team talks about balance and monetization, onboarding should be in that conversation. It is your conversion funnel from “installed” to “invested.”
Put your best design in the first 10 minutes
Many teams save their cleverest ideas for hour three. Players might never see them. A product mindset flips that:
Front‑load one memorable moment that captures your game’s soul—a power spike, a narrative twist, a beautiful vista, a clever mechanic.
Use onboarding to earn the right to explain more later: once players feel something special, they’ll tolerate a bit more guidance.
Onboarding isn’t the prelude to the real game; it is the first release of your game’s promise. When you design it as a living product—measured, iterated, and respected—you don’t just teach mechanics. You win belief.
How hyper‑casual teams test onboarding
1. Prototype → marketability → onboarding
Teams rarely build the full game first.
They start with a tiny prototype and run CTR tests on ad creatives (10–15 second videos) to see if the core idea even attracts clicks; only promising concepts move on to a playable build.Once basic marketability is proven (acceptable CTR and CPI), they build 5–10 levels and wire in the simplest possible onboarding: one control scheme, one core loop, almost no meta.
That “Level 1–3 + basic HUD + basic tutorial hints” bundle is treated as a separate product: it gets its own metrics, experiments, and prioritization before the rest of the game is expanded.
2. A/B testing flows, not just buttons
Hyper‑casual live ops teams A/B test entire onboarding flows on fresh users:
Examples of variants they run in parallel:
Flow A: mandatory tap‑through tutorial with arrows and text.
Flow B: no tutorial pop‑ups, but strongly guided level design (funnel shapes, safe zones, fewer enemies).
Flow C: ultra‑short, context‑sensitive hints triggered only when players fail twice at the same step.
New installs are automatically split into cohorts (e.g., 10k users per variant) and exposed to different flows for a fixed window (often a few days) to gain statistical confidence.
Success is judged against hard metrics:
Day‑0 and Day‑1 retention.
Time to first failure and time to first “win”.
Tutorial completion rate and drop‑off per step.
Ad impressions and early LTV, to ensure a “gentler” flow doesn’t destroy monetization.
If a new onboarding variant beats the control on retention without hurting revenue, it’s rolled out to 100% of new users and becomes the new baseline.
3. Parallel experiments across multiple surfaces
The more advanced teams run many tests at once but keep them isolated by scope:
One group focuses on onboarding: first session flow, controls explanation, early difficulty.
Another group runs tests on ad density and placement (e.g., when to show the first interstitial).
Another handles store / offer surfaces (e.g., starter packs, revive offers).
They use configuration or remote settings so that:
Each experiment has its own audience slice (e.g., 20% of new users) and does not overlap in a way that corrupts results.
Onboarding tests usually target only new players, because those are the users who have never seen the flow before and give a clean measurement.
4. What “refinement” looks like in practice
Over weeks, onboarding is tightened via small, measurable changes, for example:
Control scheme tests:
Variant A: “Tap to move” with a short tutorial overlay.
Variant B: “Hold and drag” with a ghost trail indicating direction.
Variant C: Let players try both in the first few seconds and auto‑select the one with higher early success.
Difficulty ramp experiments:
Make level 1 almost impossible to fail but visually exciting.
Delay first genuine failure to level 3 or later, then track how that change affects Day‑1 retention and session length.
Information density adjustments:
Replace three onboarding pop‑ups with one animated example and a subtle HUD hint.
Move certain explanations (like meta‑currency) out of first session into the second or third session.
Every change must “earn its keep” by improving a metric or at least not harming critical ones; there is no sacred copy or layout.
5. Treating onboarding as a permanent live‑ops lane
In successful hyper‑casual F2P teams, onboarding work never “finishes”:
New features or monetization changes trigger new onboarding passes:
the first‑time experience is updated so players understand what’s changed without being overwhelmed.Onboarding experiments are planned on the same board as events and monetization tests, with:
Clear hypotheses (“shorter tutorial will improve Day‑0 retention without lowering ARPU”).
Defined run time and sample size.
Criteria for rollback or full rollout.
Lessons from onboarding tests inform top‑of‑funnel creative as well (ads begin to mirror the clearest, most successful representation of the first‑session experience).
In other words, for hyper‑casual live ops, onboarding is a standing workstream with its own backlog and experiments, not a one‑off pre‑launch task.