Most game dev teams have a strong idea of who our game's target audience is, and that includes the kind of context they should already have. If we're building a big budget AAA first person shooter, we can expect that our representative player recognizes and likes first person shooters and is likely already familiar with the basics of how to play them. It is unlikely we will need to teach them the very basics like how to move about the map and aim or what strafing is. If we're building a casual mobile game where we expect our representative player is new to games and lacks the context needed to play, we'll need to spend more effort to teach them that context.

The need for tutorialization is especially high in two major cases:

In these situations, it is a good idea to spend significantly more resources on tutorials than games with more traditional gameplay. We, unfortunately, don't always get the resources to do that. In those cases, it ends up hurting the game's reception because players will often miss the features entirely and then complain they aren't there.

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On game length

One of the most common questions I get is about game length. People ask me why games seem like they are getting shorter and shorter. In actuality, game lengths haven't actually shortened or lengthened significantly for the past twenty years. If anything, they've gotten a bit longer since the early days of the C64 and the NES generation, where a single game could often be finished from beginning to end within literal minutes once you knew what to do. 

There are a few key reasons that they may seem shorter than before:

You, as a player, have gotten better at recognizing and learning game mechanics. You've probably played a good number of games and are fairly invested in the medium. You can recognize certain tropes and cues, and react accordingly, and you're comparing your ability to process this information with you at a younger, newer period before you had these skills.

Gamers today have many more ways of disseminating and teaching a game's mechanics than they did 30 years ago, and as a result, something that would have taken you hours or more to figure out via trial, error, and learning would take you seconds to find on google or youtube, or to get a response by posting on a message board, or reading a FAQ. In addition, there’s just a whole lot more of them out there. A contributing population many times the size of those of yesteryear tends to push games to their limits within hours of launch.  Sharing of information has changed the metagame. People are improving faster than they used to as a result of all of these factors. Part of this is because there are just a lot more games produced today, and that competition is fierce, so if your game doesn't do it, somebody else's game is going to.

Games today also are designed to be more intuitive, more new player-friendly, and thus usually spend thousands of man-hours crafting a tutorial process to teach you the game and the game's mechanics. This is an incredibly important shift toward transparency from days past, where there was an explicit opacity between the player and the game mechanics. For example, there was no tutorial in Super Mario Bros 2 (or Doki! Doki! Panic! for the purists out there) for the crouch power-up jump feature, yet the game play explicitly required it to advance. Older games often required a lot of trial and error to get through, while today such things are frowned upon and denigrated for being unintuitive. 

Players are less willing to accept it if they lose for reasons outside of their control. When they lose, they want to feel as if it is some choice that they made that was wrong, and a chance to fix it. They absolutely despise it when it is up to random chance that causes them to lose, and losing the game is also the best traditional way to extend game length. It forces the player to backtrack and repeat content they already had to do. 

Another element that has become more popular in recent years is the abundance and ease of save points and checkpoints. A lot of old games required you to restart a level or area from the very beginning, whereas developers today place a lot more checkpoints to minimize restarting frustration for the players, and allow saves to occur in a lot more places. This would have taken a whole lot of the frustration away from old games like Castlevania or Ninja Gaiden if you could restart much closer to where you died, and saved your progress wherever you liked.

All of these issues combine with a steady feeling of progression for the player, when they ultimately reach the end. While the amount of game time spent from beginning to end hasn't really lessened, it's that players are losing less and playing through them at a steady pace. Once upon a time, it was actually considered difficult to play through an entire game without losing. Now it's actually rather rare.