What's the difference between server errors and client crashes?

Client crashes happen on players' devices and affect individual players (the one whose device crashed), occurring across your fragmented hardware and leaving a stack trace on the device. Server errors happen on your backend and can affect everyone at once if a service goes down, occurring under production load and needing capture from the server. They have different blast radii, one device versus potentially your whole player base, and different capture points.

Should I monitor both client crashes and server errors?

For an online game, yes, they're different failure modes with different impacts. Client crashes are distributed (many devices, each affecting one player) and captured from the field with device context. Server errors are centralized (your backend, potentially affecting everyone) and captured from production. Watching only one leaves you blind to half your failures, so monitor both to have full visibility across your game's client and server.

Why are server errors potentially more severe than client crashes?

Because of blast radius. A client crash affects the individual player whose device crashed, while a server error can affect everyone at once, if a backend service goes down, all your players are hit simultaneously. So while a client crash is one player's bad experience, a server outage can be a game-wide failure. That centralized impact is why server-side monitoring and fast error detection matter so much for online games, alongside client crash reporting.

Server Errors vs Client Crashes

Quick answer: Client crashes happen on players' devices and affect individual players; server errors happen on your backend and can affect everyone at once. Online games must monitor both.

For online games, failures can happen in two places, on the player's device (client) or on your servers (backend), and they behave very differently. Knowing the distinction shapes how you monitor each. Here's the comparison.

What Client Crashes Are

Client crashes happen on players' devices, the game crashes on someone's phone or PC. They affect individual players (the one whose device crashed), occur across your fragmented device landscape, and leave a stack trace on the device that crash reporting captures. Client crashes are about the diversity of player hardware.

Bugnet captures client crashes from the field with device context and groups them by signature, so you find what's crashing across players' devices. Client crashes scale with your player base and hardware diversity, each one is one player's device failing.

What Server Errors Are

Server errors happen on your backend, where your game's online services run. Critically, a server problem can affect everyone at once, if a service goes down, all players are hit, unlike a client crash that affects one device. Server errors occur under real production load and need capturing from the server, not the client.

Bugnet captures server-side errors with context, so backend failures surface with the detail to diagnose them. Server errors are about your infrastructure under load, and their blast radius can be your entire player base, which makes them potentially more severe than any single client crash.

Why Online Games Must Monitor Both

The two fail differently and need monitoring on both sides. Client crashes are distributed (many devices, individual impact) and captured from the field; server errors are centralized (your backend, potentially everyone affected) and captured from production. Watching only one leaves you blind to half your failure modes.

Bugnet captures both client crashes and server errors, so you have visibility across the whole system. So for an online game, monitor both: client crashes for the device-side failures affecting individual players, and server errors for the backend failures that can take everyone down, since they're different problems with different blast radii.

Client crashes happen on players' devices (affecting individuals, captured from the field); server errors happen on your backend (potentially affecting everyone, captured from production). Online games must monitor both.