Why game developers should prioritise player trust over instant dopamine

• Stacevic says the first eight to ten seconds of gameplay should establish respect for the player’s time rather than push rewards or tutorials.
• Long loading screens, cluttered interfaces and intrusive onboarding can quickly signal to players that a game does not value their time.
• Puzzle, time-management and other casual genres are increasingly adding story and meta-progression to sustain engagement.

Jaroslav Stacevic is head of innovation at Nordcurrent.

Amid all the discourse around the downsides of digital life, it seems we can’t stop focusing on our shortened attention spans. Recent findings published by cognitive scientist Gloria Mark suggest the average person has a fraction of the attention span they did 20 years ago.

In 2003, people managed to concentrate on a single task for about two and a half minutes. Now we’re topping out at 40 seconds.

Game companies have responded to this by adopting the gospel of instant gratification. Developers assume a player is teetering on the edge of distraction from the moment they start the game, so they deliver a dopamine hit as fast as possible.

These developers aren’t wrong to think a player is just moments away from distraction, particularly when playing mobile games where any number of notifications might pop up on the same screen. This is a misdiagnosis. Attention spans are not the enemy of depth. Disrespect for the player’s time is.

The first eight to ten seconds of a game - that brief but meaty moment of engagement on which extended playtime depends - are not the space to dish out rewards or sweep in with tutorials as quickly as possible. That interval of time is for establishing trust.

Players decide almost immediately whether a game values their presence. Long loading screens, sluggish transitions, cluttered interfaces, and intrusive onboarding are dead giveaways that it doesn’t. A game that wastes even ten seconds of a player’s time is doomed to fail in an ecosystem where players can switch games in seconds.

When players feel respected, their behaviour tells a rather different story. They’ll invest hundreds of hours in demanding, complex games. They’ll embrace difficulty and forgo instant gratification for delayed payoff. So-called “TikTok brains” actually do focus the moment a game demonstrates craft and intent.

In other words - and this is among the most evergreen maxims in this industry - don’t fix the player. Fix the game.

Refocus on friction

Rather than bemoaning broader cultural issues, developers should redirect their energy toward solving a product-quality issue.

Players aren’t the problem. They never lost their tolerance for depth, just purposeless friction. This includes pop-ups they’re tired of closing over and over and tutorials they’re tired of skipping because they already know the skills. Add slow loading that breaks immersion and hand-holding that undercuts discovery to this list.

Confuse guidance with engagement at your own peril - and many modern games do, layering explanations, arrows, and prompts over systems players would prefer to learn organically. Over-explaining replaces curiosity with boredom. No one enjoys being constantly told what to do.

Even high-budget AAA games fall into the trap of excessive onboarding. It reads as a lack of confidence in the design itself or, even worse, in the player’s intelligence. A game that insists on narrating every step treats its players as stupid and signals that nothing meaningful is coming next. 

As it happens, players aren’t stupid. They’ll notice.

Meaning trumps immediacy

Contrary to popular belief, today’s audiences are not demanding more gratification faster. They are asking for meaning and immersion.

Across mobile, casual, and core gaming there is a visible shift toward experiences grounded in narrative, character, emotional connection, and world-building. Players want to understand the purpose behind a given mission, not just the mechanics of it.

This shift is particularly revealing in traditionally simple and non-narrative genres. Puzzle games, time-management titles, and casual experiences increasingly rely on story and meta-layers to stay relevant. Even the most elegant loop benefits from context, progression, and a sense of purpose. Simplicity and shallowness don’t go hand-in-hand. Games that are easy to pick up can still be plenty rich in meaning.

Intentional design, familiar mechanics

Recent successes on the indie stage underscore this point. Titles celebrated at The Game Awards 2025 demonstrated that originality does not require abandoning familiar mechanics.

Winners showed restraint in onboarding and confidence in pacing. The emotional intent was clear but unforced. Players were trusted to explore and to fail - and trusted to not to quit immediately after failure. Engagement followed naturally.

There is an organic quality to this approach. It resonates because it matches how players make decisions. They do not evaluate a game based on the speed at which it spits out a reward. They assess whether it feels intentional and whether the world holds together.

When curiosity is respected and these conditions are met, time becomes elastic. Hours melt away.

The new differentiator

The gaming industry’s fixation on instant dopamine obscures the fact that depth is the differentiator. Always has been, always will be.

Depth does not mean complexity for its own sake. A game with depth is thematically and mechanically coherent. Its onboarding feels inviting, not overbearingly schoolmarm-y. Anything that doesn’t respect the player and build trust has been scrapped. It also doesn’t barrage the player within the first ten seconds.

In a crowded market, the best games will spend the first ten seconds signalling competence and respect in an entertaining way, not exhausting the player. Have a little faith in your audience. They will commit and keep coming back, so long as you give them the respect they deserve.