Quick answer: A small bug bounty during launch week funnels real-player testing into your ticket system. Tier rewards by severity, cap the budget, and close it within 30 days.
Players will find bugs you didn't. Pay a small amount for the good reports and you'll triage more in a week than QA found in a month.
Tier rewards
Sev-1 (crash/blocker): in-game cosmetic + $25 storefront credit. Sev-2 (broken feature): cosmetic. Sev-3 (cosmetic bug): shoutout in changelog. Real money quickly becomes complex tax-wise.
Cap the budget
$2000 total, first-come-first-served. The cap protects you from a viral exploit; the first-come incentive front-loads reports during launch week.
Require reproducible reports
'I died' is not a bug. 'I died and reloading the save shows me at a different position' is. Document the minimum acceptable report in your bounty rules.
Close in 30 days
Bounties left open become a permanent expectation. Close them on day 30, thank participants, and start triaging from your normal channels.
“A bug bounty is launch QA you don't have to staff.”
Connect the bounty form directly to your bug tracker. A bounty submission should create a ticket automatically; the manual triage is the same as any other report.