Comment by Gigachad
5 years ago
Or have proper analytics. If a user emails you and says "It crashes after a few hours" rather than feeling bad for them, you ask them what their steam/game id is and you look them up in the crash reporter system and see exactly what happens rather than relying on a few programmer consumers doing the work for you.
But not analytics that are too good, or certain people will write a lot of inflammatory articles about how your software is nothing but evil spyware.
Seriously, though, having a robust and automatic crash reporting system very much helps track down bugs you're never going to get a good report on or be able to directly reproduce.
It's not really that hard to do this: ask bug reporters to attach their logs. Don't just take them preemptively "just in case".
If I asked users to attach a bug report file, most of them would complain and tell me to stop waisting their time and get the problem fixed. I have many times explained to users that I found their issue in our reporting and have not ever got a negative response.
The average user does not give two shits that you can see exactly what line of code their instance of your game crashed at. They want to play a video game and not play find the bug with you.
The vast majority of users would not even be as nice as to email you saying there was a crash. They would just immediately complain on twitter or refund the product if it wasn’t resolved without any interaction.
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