Game Design Challenge: How to avoid user from skipping the game tutorial.

The most common issue now days for a game designer is to retain the user to play the tutorial before starting into the gameplay. Players leave games. According to Marc Robinson’s 2013 GDC talk, “On average, less than 40% of players return to a free-to-play game after just one session.” As players tend to lose interest when they skip tutorial and fail to understand the core gameplay thus they quit and as a game designer you fail to retain the player.

So how to retain this 40%? Looks like a challenging task but there are curtain step as a game designer we can take to retain these player. I have listed few of them below.

1. Stop Forcing Tutorial to the players!!!!!!!! This is one of the common mistake done by the game designers that is forcing the player to continue the tutorial in beginning. There is a strong chance the user might know the initial bit of the game and forcing that leads to loss of interest for them.
2. Implementing tutorial as reward and player level up process, as the player get rewarded for performing instructed task it helps the player to get used to the gameplay as well as level up his character at early stage.
3. Implementing tutorial as core gameplay, while this is a debatable suggestion but implementing tutorial as core gameplay as core gameplay can help the first time players to understand the game better.
4. Avoid to many instruction and complex interaction in the beginning of your tutorial. It is always suggested to keep tutorial very layman and easy to interact so that player can learn easily.
5. Your character to guide your player with the gameplay, this will help the player get into his character in your game easily.

These are few of the steps I can suggest for , I would love to know your suggestion to please feel free to comment below.