What's a Good Crash-Free Rate for an Indie Game?

“What's a Good Crash-Free Rate for an Indie Game?” is a fair question, and the honest answer is less about a magic number than about a target you defend and a trend you watch. A common bar is 99%+ of sessions crash-free, but what matters more is the trend across your builds. What matters is whether the number is high, stable, and improving — and whether the individual failures behind it are getting fixed. This guide covers how to think about crash-free sessions and act on it: measure your crash-free session rate per build and aim to keep it high and rising.

How to think about crash-free sessions

The useful way to think about crash-free sessions is as a target and a trend rather than an absolute. A common bar is 99%+ of sessions crash-free, but what matters more is the trend across your builds. A single number in isolation tells you little; the same number rising or falling across your builds tells you almost everything, because it reflects whether your releases are making the game more or less stable.

It is also worth remembering that an average can hide a serious problem. A healthy-looking overall crash-free sessions can still contain one signature hammering a slice of your players, which is why you pair the headline number with a ranked list of individual failures.

Turning a pile of crashes into a ranked worklist

Raw crash data is overwhelming if every occurrence is its own line. The trick is grouping: identical failures, fingerprinted by their stack trace, collapse into one issue with a count. Suddenly the question “what should I fix first?” answers itself, because the bug hitting the most players sits at the top with the biggest number next to it.

That ordering is what makes a small team effective. You are never going to fix everything, but you do not have to. Fixing the top few signatures usually removes the large majority of real-world failures, and prioritising by frequency means your limited hours always go to the bug that matters most right now.

Why the report you get is never the whole story

When a player does take the time to tell you something broke, the message is almost always thin: “it crashed,” maybe a screenshot, rarely a version number, and almost never the exact steps. You are left reconstructing the scene of an accident from a single blurry photo. The information you actually need to fix the bug — the stack trace, the device, the build, the state the game was in — is precisely what a human report leaves out.

That is why working from manual reports alone keeps you slow. Every ticket becomes a back-and-forth interrogation, and half the time the player has moved on before you get an answer. Automatic capture removes the interrogation entirely, because the context travels with the failure the instant it happens.

Connecting failures to the build that caused them

Regressions are the cruelest class of bug because they punish your most engaged players — the ones who already own the game and updated to your newest patch. A change meant to improve things quietly breaks something else, and without build-level tracking you have no way to link the dip in retention to the release that caused it.

The fix is to attach a build identifier to every captured failure. Then a new signature that appears the day you ship a patch is unmistakable, and you can roll back or hotfix while only a few players are affected instead of discovering the problem weeks later in your reviews.

Setting and defending a target

To act on crash-free sessions, measure your crash-free session rate per build and aim to keep it high and rising. Pick a target you are willing to defend, measure it per build, and treat a drop as a signal to investigate rather than a number to explain away. That turns crash-free sessions from a vanity figure into a release gate that actually protects your players.

Underneath it all is the same foundation: capture every failure with full context, group identical ones so you can rank by impact, and tie each to its build so you can see which release moved the number. With that, crash-free sessions stops being an abstract benchmark and becomes something you steer.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every failure automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds identical failures into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it happened on. The result is that the abstract idea above stops being theory and becomes a ranked list you work down — the worst problem first, verified fixed when its signature disappears from the next release.

Most of the failures hurting your game are silent. The first job is making them visible; the fixes get a lot easier after that.