Churn: Is Your Onboarding a Welcome Mat or a Brick Wall?

In the mobile gaming world, the first 10 minutes aren’t just "early game"—they are your entire game. If you lose users there, they are gone forever.

At FastSight, we call it Acute Onboarding Churn: players download your game, play it for 3 minutes, and uninstall before they even see your core loop. Here's how to diagnose and fix it.

Symptoms: Your Players Are Flatlining

• The Bait-and-Switch: Your ad promised "Epic Battles," but the first 5 minutes are "Menu Navigation Training." If the gameplay doesn't match the promise immediately, the player feels cheated.
• Boring Lecture: "Sit down, shut up, and read this text box about the Lore of the Sacred Crystals." Newsflash: Your player didn't come for a history lesson. They came to smash things, solve things, and win things.
• The Wall of Text: If your tutorial prompt is longer than 8-10 words, it's unlikely anyone will read it. They are frantically tapping the screen to make it go away—or worse, tapping the "Home" button.
• The Passenger Seat: Forced tutorials that click for the player are the ultimate buzzkill. If they aren't making decisions, they aren't playing; they’re watching a movie they didn't buy a ticket for.
  
  

FastSight Lab Prescribes
Don’t give your players a 20-page manual. Deliver on the promise, provide good hooks, and focus on a great User Experience.

1. Deliver on the promise
Put yourself in your players' shoes and try to immediately deliver on the vision that your ad and store page have planted in their heads. They came for a puzzle? Puzzle them!

2. The 120-Second Win
The Time-to-Dopamine needs to be under two minutes. Give them a victory—a small boss, a completed puzzle, or a shiny chest—immediately. If they haven't felt like a winner fast, they’ll find a game that makes them feel like one.

3. Kill the "Next" Button
Interactive onboarding is the only viable kind of onboarding. Point to interface elements instead of explaining them. Embed hints as a part of a game level. Let the players learn by interacting. Tutorials like this are harder to build, but they are well worth it.

4. Visual Vitals
Humans are magpies. They love shiny things that move. Instead of telling your players that they are progressing, show them. An XP bar that fills, a map uncovering itself, or a physical collection of items gathered in the first 3 minutes provides a visual delight and investment that keeps them from quitting.