Strategy games lose a substantial share of new players in the first hour, and the tutorial is where that happens. Building a good one is far more expensive than it appears from the outside.
Tutorials are authored content over moving systems
A tutorial scripts a specific sequence of actions, so it depends on button positions, resource values and interface layout staying exactly as they were when it was written.
Those things change throughout development, and every change breaks a step somewhere in the scripted flow.
Teams therefore delay tutorial work until systems settle, which pushes it into the crowded final stretch when time is scarcest.
Every localized version multiplies the cost
Tutorial text is dense with interface terms, and each of those terms must match the translated interface exactly or the instruction stops making sense.
A late change to one system therefore generates retranslation work across every language the game ships in.
This is a genuine reason studios keep tutorials shorter than designers want, rather than an excuse for neglecting them.
Teaching order is a design problem
Strategy systems are interdependent, so explaining production requires explaining resources, which requires explaining terrain, and the dependency graph has no clean starting point.
Designers resolve this by staging a campaign that disables systems and reintroduces them, which means building simplified versions of the game that must also be maintained.
Those simplified states are effectively additional configurations to test, and they break whenever a designer assumes a system is always available.
Testing needs people who have never played
The team cannot evaluate its own tutorial, because everyone involved already knows what the interface means and where to look.
Useful testing requires recruiting genuine newcomers, observing them, and doing it repeatedly as the tutorial changes.
Since each participant is only naive once, the supply of valid testers is consumed by the process, which makes iteration slower than it is elsewhere.
The payoff is measured in refunds and retention
American storefront refund windows are short and generous, so a player who bounces in the first hour can undo the sale entirely.
Marketing spend has already been committed to acquire that player, which makes early abandonment expensive in a way that is easy to overlook.
Studios that treat onboarding as a system rather than an afterthought are responding to that arithmetic, not to a preference for hand-holding.