
Do you need Crash Reporting in 2025?
In short: yes! Crash reporting helps dev teams ship smoother apps and games by catching issues early, fixing faster, and launching with confidence.

Joey P
Head of Product at BugSplat
There’s a moment every developer knows too well: the quiet heartbeat before release, when the build goes live and all you can do is wait. Will it run smoothly? Or will the first few users uncover the one crash QA never saw coming?
In 2025, there’s no excuse for shipping buggy software—but that doesn’t make building stable software easy. Too many teams still lack the visibility and tooling to understand how their apps behave once they’re in the hands of real users.
That visibility is what separates the folks who sleep easy after release from those who wake up to a flood of @mentions about crashes and bugs. In 2025 teams can’t build stable software if they can’t see when and where it’s breaking in production.
That’s where good old-fashioned, roll-up-your-sleeves, stare-down-the-stack-trace-before-the-caffeine-wears-off crash reporting comes in. Because when crash and error data flow automatically into your support and development workflow, you finally see the full picture: performance, critical defects, and user pain points. That kind of visibility gives you the insight to ship robust, stable code by fixing critical issues as they pop up, before they turn into major failure points for your users.
And how do we know this? Well we’ve spent over a decade as a team at BugSplat helping teams ship stable applications and games. We’ve seen everything from silky-smooth launches to the kind that turn into fire drills before lunch.
What we’ve learned is simple: teams that build crash reporting into their process ship faster, fix smarter, and spend more time building the stuff users actually love. And that’s only becoming truer as codebases grow more complex, development cycles get shorter, users get more sophisticated, and hardware gets more unpredictable.
Why Stability Matters More Than Ever
The rules of shipping haven’t changed—users still expect software, especially desktop tools and PC games, to just work. They’re less tolerant of crashes than ever and, as always, more likely to uninstall than report a problem if it happens twice.
The desktop ecosystem hasn’t gotten simpler, either. New drivers roll out monthly, OS updates shift memory permissions, graphics APIs evolve, and users install plugins that do everything short of rewriting your process memory. You can test for months and still miss the one edge case that crashes on launch day.
That’s why visibility matters more than ever. Logs can tell you what you already expected; crash reports show you everything you didn’t.
QA is essential, but it lives in a lab. Real users live in the wild. They alt-tab mid-load, they unplug controllers, they ignore every warning you put in front of them. Logs help when you already know what to look for. Crash reports help when you don’t.
A good crash reporting system doesn’t just collect failures—it organizes them. It groups thousands of raw reports into clear patterns that point straight to the most critical defects. That’s the difference between reacting to random logs and fixing the bugs that actually move the needle. It’s not just debugging; it’s triage.
We’ve spent years at BugSplat helping teams see what they didn’t know was broken—before their users do, and before small issues snowball into bad launches.
Pro Tip: Before you blame your code, check the drivers. Always the drivers.
What Great Crash Data Looks Like
Crash reporting today isn’t about collecting everything—it’s about collecting what matters.
A useful crash report starts with a clean stack trace. A raw address like 0x00007FF91A34B52
is noise; a symbolicated trace that says PlayerInventory::AddItem()
points straight to the fix. That’s the difference between hours of guesswork and one clear path forward.
Then comes context: hardware, OS, and driver data that explain why something failed. On PC, driver mismatches are behind a surprising number of “random” crashes. If 80% of reports trace back to NVIDIA driver 546.33
, that’s not your code—it’s the ecosystem misbehaving.
After that, it’s all about the details that make a report human. Window state. Active tool. File type. Last action taken. Those breadcrumbs turn “random crash” into “crash when opening large CAD files while rendering in the background.” Add the user’s own description of what they were doing, and you’ve got everything you need to reproduce the issue without guesswork.
And of course, the real power comes from everything that rides along with the report—attached log files, memory dumps, and full debugger output. It’s all there, pointed directly at the line of code causing the issue. The toys every developer wants when it’s time to get their hands dirty and actually fix something.
The best part? It’s not just about insight—it’s about speed. Symbolicated stack traces, grouped reports, and version tracking cut diagnosis time by as much as 70%, helping teams stay ahead of production issues instead of chasing them.
Crash reporting today isn’t about collecting everything—it’s about collecting what matters.
Crash Reporting in Practice
We’ve seen how real teams turn data into better launches.
Crash reporting now sits at the heart of SketchUp’s QA workflow, automating debugging and freeing their developers to focus on fixes—not setup. That reliability keeps their desktop client stable for millions of professional users.
“BugSplat isn’t just a service provider—they’re a true partner in our success.”
— Jason Antonacci, DevOps Engineer, SketchUp
Over in the games world, Tantalus relies on crash reporting to keep their cross-platform titles smooth.
“BugSplat shows us exactly what’s breaking so we can fix what matters most,” says Joss Ellis, Studio Head. “We spend less time hunting bugs and more time shipping great games.”
And for Disruptive Games, which builds massive multiplayer experiences in Unreal, crash reporting turned chaos into clarity.
“BugSplat makes crash reporting so simple that even non-technical team members can contribute. Just push a button instead of hunting down logs.”
— Bryan Corell, CTO, Disruptive Games
All three teams share the same story: more fixes, faster resolutions, and less stress. Across our customer base, bugs reported through BugSplat are 5× more likely to get fixed than user-submitted tickets—and teams that address their top five crash types often see 50% or more fewer crashes in their next version.
That’s the quiet math behind stable launches.
The Modern Crash Reporting Playbook
Crash reporting isn’t a “nice to have” feature—it’s part of a healthy engineering workflow.
The best teams we work with treat crash spikes like incidents. When a new crash group suddenly lights up after a release, it triggers an alert, not a debate. They fix it, verify it, move on.
They automate everything: symbol uploads, version tagging, build metadata. Forgetting symbols once is enough to scar anyone.
They compare builds like scientists—checking which crashes disappeared, which new ones appeared, and what stayed stubbornly in the middle.
They tag contextual scenarios—like whether the app was minimized, using GPU acceleration, or handling large files—so they can reproduce real-world failures quickly.
And the smartest teams run postmortems after every major release, using crash data as a feedback loop for the next cycle.
Pro Tip: If your build doesn’t have symbols, your build isn’t ready.
BugSplat quietly powers a lot of these workflows behind the scenes. We designed it to integrate directly into your stack—CI/CD pipelines, Jira, GitHub, Slack—so it works the way your team already does.
Why It Makes the Business Side Happy Too
Crash reporting isn’t just technical hygiene—it’s business leverage.
Support teams save time by linking real crash groups to tickets instead of saying “we’re investigating.” Marketing teams don’t lose launch momentum to negative reviews about stability. And leadership gets something concrete to brag about: “We’re halving our crash rate across each version release.”
When everyone’s working from the same clear data, it’s easier to make smart calls, ship confident updates, and keep users happy. That’s why we tell customers that crash reporting isn’t a cost center—it’s an amplifier.
Across hundreds of teams, crash reports collected through BugSplat lead to finding the 20% of defects that create 80% of the crashes for your users. Stability pays off.
The Secret Weapon at Launch
Launch week is chaos no matter how many times you’ve done it. But there’s a big difference between chaos you understand and chaos you don’t.
When your crash data is live, you can see the storm forming. You know which issues matter, when to hotfix, and when to take a breath because the graph’s still flat.
That’s the dream—not perfection, but awareness. And awareness turns into speed.
BugSplat helps make that possible by giving teams the right data at the right time, so launch week feels less like a fire drill and more like a victory lap.
Main Takeaways
If you scrolled all the way to the bottom looking for the answer to the question in the title, here it is: yes. If you’re supporting an application or video game in 2025, you need crash reporting.
If you’re getting ready for a release—whether it’s your first game, your tenth tool, or your latest desktop client—build your crash plan now. Automate symbol uploads. Add alerts. Tag the right metadata. And make sure someone’s watching that dashboard when the build goes live.
You can’t stop every bug from shipping. But you can make sure you see it, understand it, and fix it fast. That’s what turns crash reporting from a safety net into a secret weapon.
Want to see what that looks like in action? Spin up a free BugSplat account and throw a test crash at it—you’ll see in five minutes why teams call it their launch radar.
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