Quick answer: Hotfix when a bug's ongoing damage, blocking progress, corrupting data, crashing for many, exceeds the risk and cost of an out-of-band release. Most bugs can wait for the regular update; the hotfix bar is high reach plus high severity plus damage that compounds with every hour.
A hotfix, an out-of-band emergency release, is a powerful tool and a costly one. It interrupts your work, skips your normal testing cadence, and carries the risk that a rushed fix introduces a new problem. So the decision of whether a bug is bad enough to hotfix matters: pull the trigger too readily and you destabilize your own game, too reluctantly and you let serious damage compound. Knowing where the bar sits keeps you from both mistakes.
The Hotfix Bar Is High by Design
Most bugs, even annoying ones, can wait for your next regular update, because a scheduled release is tested and predictable while a hotfix is neither. The hotfix bar should be high: reserved for bugs whose damage is severe enough and widespread enough that letting it continue until the next update is worse than the risk of an emergency patch. If a bug fails that test, it goes in the normal update, not a hotfix.
The key concept is compounding damage. A bug that hurts a fixed, bounded amount can wait. A bug whose harm grows with every hour, more corrupted saves, more blocked players, more refunds and bad reviews, is the kind that justifies interrupting everything, because the cost of waiting keeps rising.
Weigh Reach, Severity, and Compounding Harm
Three factors push a bug over the hotfix line. Reach: is it hitting many players or a few? Severity: is it game-breaking, blocking progress, corrupting data, crashing on launch, or merely annoying? And compounding: is the damage ongoing and accumulating? A bug that scores high on all three, a launch-blocking crash hitting most players and generating refunds by the hour, is a clear hotfix. A low-reach cosmetic glitch is clearly not, no matter how visible it is to the few who see it.
Occurrence data sharpens this judgment. Bugnet's real-time occurrence counts tell you immediately whether a bug is hitting a handful of players or spiking across your whole base, which is exactly the reach signal the hotfix decision turns on. A bug whose count is climbing fast is one whose damage is compounding, the signature of a hotfix candidate.
Account for the Hotfix's Own Risk
A hotfix is not free of danger, a fix shipped fast and under pressure can introduce a regression, sometimes worse than the bug it fixed. Factor that risk into the decision: a small, well-understood, low-risk fix is much easier to justify hotfixing than a sprawling change you are not confident in. Sometimes the right call for a serious-but-complex bug is a careful fix in the next update plus a temporary workaround now, rather than a risky emergency patch.
When you do hotfix, keep the change minimal and focused on the one bug, the smaller the change, the lower the regression risk. And watch closely after it ships, using version-tagged reports to confirm the hotfix actually resolved the issue without introducing a new one. The goal is to use the hotfix tool deliberately: high bar, clear criteria, minimal change, and verification, so it stays a remedy rather than becoming a new source of instability.
Most bugs wait for the next update. Hotfix only when the damage compounds faster than the fix risks.