Your point kind of proves the opposite. Many players will benefit from tutorials, of course. But if making them unskippable helps the bottom 10%, who otherwise can’t correctly judge if they would need them, then we get unskippable tutorials.
The same bullshit applies to dynamic (cheating) difficulty levels, another bane of modern game design where you can’t get ahead by doing well.
In any case, even it it were only 10% it's hardly a symmetrical tradeoff. Those bottom 10% cannot play the game at all without the tutorial, while for the rest it's a few minutes of boring content in an otherwise hours-long game. Seems like a worthwhile investment to add the tutorial.
One of the examples in the article was about spending an hour on intro levels before getting to the "meat" of the game.
Plus, "a few minutes of boring content" is no small thing to trudge through.
Before responding, please listen to this musical piece in its entirety[1]. It's only about four and a half minutes long in an otherwise hours-long conversation, so should not be a problem for you.
The 10% most familiar with the game/genre/developer/controls don't need the tutorial, and know it. I'd argue it's not the bottom 10% least familiar with the game that are harmed by the skip option; they know they need the tutorial, and aren't significantly harmed by the presence of a discrete skip option.
The 10% that cannot play the game because THEY chose to use the skip option, and not to return to the tutorial when they can't figure it out, but instead give up and leave a bad review... they're the only population (against their will!) from the removal of the skip button.
I have 2 hours of gaming per day during the week if I don't have anything else to do, which is rare, so it translates more to 2 hours once every 5 days (weekend is ad-hoc).
10 minutes is roughly 8% of that time, so if the game doesn't hook within 30 minutes (that can be with a nice intro, with a FUN tutorial, or throwing me into the gameplay) it gets dropped unless I have a strong referral from a friend.
That being said, most videogames I play have skippable tutorials. Not sure if that's a new problem specific to AAA, i rarely play those (although returnal on pc was very recent)
It's the "expert gamers" who skip tutorials and then get stuck and end up all frustrated and angry because the game doesn't work exactly like God Of Thing I Played Last Week.
> in the Consecrated Snowfield
The merchant outside of Leyndell sells an interesting torch that'll come in handy in Ordina, by the way.
The extra long exposition that’s basically an extended cut scene with forced interaction is an even worse trend imo. I played the new God of War for about an hour before getting bored of the horrifically bad story telling and uninstalling it. If you want to tell a story with a video game, then do it with the video game. If I want to play a video game, then I want to play a video game, not spend hours wandering between extra long cut scenes. Kojima is the only person I’ve ever forgiven for this sin, but I think that’s just because he crosses over some so bad it becomes good boundary.
Or you're not part of the target audience. For a AAA title, I agree. But I wouldn't blame, say, Crusader Kings for having complex mechanics because that's the entire point of the thing.
How so? It seems to me that being able to skip tutorials when you're not playing the game for the first time is a thing that would benefit almost all players.
There are several games that I probably will never play again because of unskippable tutorials.
And why is it suddenly OK to force players into doing stuff like this? If a player doesn't want the tutorial -- even when playing for the first time -- they shouldn't be forced to do so. It's their game and their game experience, after all.
That's pretty hyperbolic; nobody is forced to play a game. Maybe it sounds like I'm being pedantic, but you don't see anyone using the same language to talk about other parts of a game players are "forced" to go through. Nobody says you're forced to beat a tough boss, for example, even though you usually are if you want to make progress in the game.
You can probably make a good argument for treating tutorials differently from the rest of a game, but I think it's worth acknowledging that it's the norm for games to gate their content by making you complete other content first, with no way to bypass the gate. Tutorials are just a special case of that.
Yes, but that's actually playing the game. A tutorial is not. If I already know how to play the game and have to go through a tutorial anyway in order to get to the actual game, I'm being "forced" in the sense that it's a time-waster I have to go through to get to the game.
This is why there have been games I've never gone back to. Going through the tutorial yet again simply isn't worth it.
Elden Ring was hilarious though I looked at the tutorial cave and nooped out of going that way immediately as it looked way more scary than doing anything else.