Crash Reporting System

[PyTom]

I'm considering implementing a crash reporting system, intended for use with released games. The idea is that, when crashing with an exception, Ren'Py would launch a small game (call it creport) that would:

- Collect information about the crash, including the traceback.txt and opengl.txt files.
- Display to the user a dialog explaining that a crash has occured, and asking if they want to send a report to our crash-reporting server.
- The user's choices will be "Yes", "No", and "Never ask me again.".
- If the user picks yes, then the report would be uploaded via HTTP to a web server.

Once on the web server, the crash reports would go into a database, where the game-maker could look at them at his or her leisure.

The web side of things would be a hosted solution. Access to it would be free for freely-redistributable games, and $20/mo/account for other games (especially commercial ones).

My question is: Does this seem like a direction I should pursue? And for the commercial game-makers out there - would this be a service you'd consider using (and paying for)? I don't think it would be technically hard to implement, but if nobody wants it, I probably won't bother.

[jack_norton]

Yes, if you remember I asked for such a thing months ago. My idea was simpler though, that it would automatically compose an email with the traceback.txt, ready to be sent.
Actually what I would pay $20/month for would be a complete system like that one + a launcher/autoupdater. Like the one I made, but with a small program that then launches the "full program" (like the commercial MMO programs). Why? Because that way the launcher program could also update the main program. So for example if you make an update to renpy.exe itself the launcher would still be able to download the latest version.
The "launcher program" would just do that basic thing (connect, check for new version, and download) so doesn't really need to be updated to latest renpy versions (unless crashes of course).
With my system, you can't autopatch the calling program itself, so now that you made 6.11d I need to reupload the whole demo anyway and ask people to redownload everything...
So your crash reporting system is interesting (but probably really useful only during testing, for older games I have no problem at all, so I wouldn't pay $20/month once the game is out because wouldn't make sense).
But for what I described above, yes for sure I would pay that amount

[Wintermoon]

$20/mo? No thanks, I'll write my own if I need it. (I think you are seriously overestimating how poorly small indie games sell. For every success, there are several games that fail to sell even ten copies per month, especially toward the end of their life. Business is harsh, and newcomers always underestimate the difficulties.)

For free? Maybe. I'm still not happy about the game contacting a central server that I don't control, but it might produce more/better crash reports than a forum thread and I probably wouldn't bother implementing my own system for a free game.

Edit: rather than logging in, I'd rather have the crash reports emailed to me directly. I want to be able to respond to them within 24 hours, and I want to be able to respond to crash reports long after the game is released, but I don't want to commit to logging in to some website every day for the rest of my life.

[IceD]

If it's for free, why not? It might be preety useful for some developers. I don't go that far if it comes to pro dev, so i can't say anything about price, but 20$ doesn't seem that much for such an option, especially if you get it for a life-time per product. There are propably people who wouldn't have big problems doing it themselves, but even when it comes to proffesional developing, not every dev is a high-skilled programmer.

As for the overall idea, it would be good if there was an option for the traceback mailing, but rather than for every each traceback, it could gather them all on the server and send a combined e-mail once a week. I wouldn't be happy if my mailbox became spammed with tracebacks Even if a chance for that is preety microscopic, such an option would be definately better, if it's only possible, of course

[Ren]

If it's for free, why not? It might be preety useful for some developers. I don't go that far if it comes to pro dev, so i can't say anything about price, but 20$ doesn't seem that much for such an option, especially if you get it for a life-time per product. There are propably people who wouldn't have big problems doing it themselves, but even when it comes to proffesional developing, not every dev is a high-skilled programmer.

But from what I understood, the service would cost you 20$ a month, which seems a bit expensive. As Wintermoon pointed out, I doubt many developers make that much money when they sell their games, at least in most cases.

[jack_norton]

Well I understood $20/month PER GAME. If is just $20/month unlimited product then of course. But in my specific case I would pay more for the autoupdater thing

[papillon]

I can't see paying $20/month for that, although it's the caterpillar's opinion that matters really because he does the renpy coding. I can't imagine that given my current games setup there are sufficient error reports being filed to justify that sort of pricing structure. Filing reports to a server somewhere makes it all feel a bit distant, as opposed to now when people with problems just come talk to me or post on the forums. Certainly if there are people who have errors but are too shy to report them it *might* be useful to have such an option but I have no way of knowing if such people exist!

But automatically prompting the user to send the error report somewhere else and then not letting me see it would be... very frustrating.

A big error collection system would be most useful, imo, for someone running a "free" game that's either ad-supported or has paid add-ons, because something like that might have a substantially larger userbase (even though most of them pay nothing) and therefore a more formal way of organising bug reports would be handy.

[Spiky Caterpillar]

I'd likely wind up rolling my own system - it's more convenient to me to have the tracebacks arriving on my own server than added to a remote database somewhere, and that way I can readily tweak the system whenever I come up with new ways to overcomplicate it. Like integrating it with an autoupdator. (Which I've been putting off writing because I expect dealing with cryptographic signatures to be a bit of a nuisance)

[jack_norton]

I really think the email system I suggested should be fine for most uses. That's what they were using with popular titles at BFG using Emmanuel modified PTK (hanako knows who I'm talking about), so if that works for a multi-millionaire company, should be enough for indies

[Aleema]

$20 a month seems high, but you probably only need one or two month's monitoring to get all the major bugs out, so if it's too expensive, don't do it for forever. I'm not releasing any commercial games, so hopefully I and many others would qualify for free, but it sounds absolutely wonderful if it could be.

Short answer: I would love it for the Free/Free, Commercial/$20 pricing.

You could even bump free up to $5 a month or something reasonable, since you would be putting a lot of effort into the system. But for my poor brethren, I will hope you pretend I never said that.