Quick answer: Define four priority tiers with concrete examples, set a response target (time to first human reply) and a resolution target (time to fix shipped) for each, and review compliance monthly. Even tiny studios benefit — an SLA isn’t a corporate artifact, it’s the written promise that keeps your team from forgetting about the bug that’s breaking saves for 300 people.

I’ve watched indie studios of every size struggle with the same pattern. A player reports a save-corrupting bug on a Friday. Someone on the team notices, shares it in Discord, says “yeah we should look at that,” and then Monday comes around and everyone’s deep in sprint work. By the time someone actually opens the report, it’s been eight days, dozens more players have hit the same issue, and your Steam discussion forum is on fire. An SLA is the simple instrument that prevents this.

Start With the Priority Tiers

Before you can set response times, you need clear priority tiers. Four works well: P0, P1, P2, P3. Fewer is too coarse to triage effectively; more turns into debates about what’s a P4 versus P5. Write concrete examples for each. The examples matter more than the definitions, because every triager will argue about the definitions and nobody argues with an example.

Pick Realistic Time Targets

Here’s a starter template that works for a studio of 3–15 people. Adjust based on whether you have on-call coverage outside business hours.

# bug-report SLA — Studio size: 5 full-time
# Business hours: Mon-Fri 09:00-18:00 local

P0: respond within  1 business hour  / resolve within  24 hours
P1: respond within  4 business hours / resolve within   5 business days
P2: respond within  2 business days  / resolve within  30 days
P3: respond within  5 business days  / resolve next release

Two things to note. First, “respond” means a human reply to the reporter — not an auto-ack, not a label change. Second, separate response time from resolution time. Response is about communication; resolution is about engineering effort. Players forgive slow fixes. They do not forgive silence.

On-Call Rotation (Even If It’s Just You)

If you don’t have a defined on-call, the implicit on-call is “whichever team member happens to check Discord first.” That’s the person who burns out. Set up a rotation — one person is the designated triager each week. Their job is not to fix every bug themselves; it’s to acknowledge, categorize, and route.

For a team of one or two, you can still have rotation: alternate weeks where bugs are the first priority each morning, with an off-week where you deliberately batch them. The point is to prevent reports from living in a perpetual “someone will look at it eventually” state.

The most expensive bug I’ve ever seen was a P0 that sat in triage for five days because nobody was explicitly responsible for checking the queue. We lost an entire weekend of sales and 43 negative reviews. A shared Google Sheet with a weekly on-call name would have prevented every dollar of that.

Track Compliance Automatically

Your bug tracker knows when a report was filed, when it was first responded to, and when it was resolved. That’s all the data you need to compute SLA compliance. Every month, pull a report that shows, for each priority tier, the percentage of bugs that met the response and resolution targets.

You don’t want 100% — 100% means your targets are too loose. Aim for 85–95% compliance. Investigate the misses. If a whole category of bugs (say, Steam Deck-specific crashes) regularly misses its SLA, that tells you something about coverage or capacity.

Communicate With Players

An SLA isn’t only internal — some portion of it should be visible to players. You don’t have to publish the exact time windows, but you do benefit from standard response templates. Three are enough:

Acknowledgement: “Thanks for the report. We’ve logged this as [ID] and will update you when we have more information.” Sent immediately on triage.

Investigation update: “We’ve reproduced the issue and are working on a fix. Expected in the next patch around [date].” Sent when the bug moves out of triage.

Resolution: “This should be fixed in version [X]. Please let us know if you still see it.” Sent when the fix ships.

Three templates, consistently used, do more for community trust than any forum post. Players want to know they’ve been heard and that someone is actually on it.

Review and Iterate

Revisit the SLA quarterly. If you’re consistently beating P1 targets, tighten them — it’s a chance to raise the bar. If you’re consistently missing P2 targets, either add capacity or loosen the target honestly. An SLA that no one hits is worse than no SLA, because it trains the team to ignore commitments.

Related Issues

For a closer look at how priority assignments play out in practice, see bug reporting metrics every game studio should track. For the weekly reporting cadence that keeps leadership informed, read how to write a game bug weekly status report.

Silence is the worst customer experience. An SLA is really just a commitment not to be silent.