How to Fix a Rewarded Ad That Doesn't Reward the Player

A rewarded ad that pays nothing is a reward-callback or state problem. Granting in the right place and persisting it fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Grant in the earned-reward callback

Use the SDK's specific earned-reward (or user-earned-reward) callback to grant, not the closed callback. Rewarding on close gives it even when the player skipped; rewarding on earned gives it only when they qualified.

2. Persist the pending reward

Save a pending-reward marker before showing the ad. Showing an ad can background the game; if it is killed or resumes oddly, you can still grant the reward from the persisted marker.

3. Reconcile on resume

When the game returns from the ad, check the earned state and the persisted marker and grant if owed. This handles the case where the callback and the resume race or the app was backgrounded.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every mobile error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.