Learn how game developer Crytek used Sauce Error Reporting to reduce its error monitoring costs by 75%, improve game stability as it scaled to 30,000 concurrent players, and free its developers to focus on innovation.
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Crytek is a leading video game development studio that built a worldwide following thanks to its commitment to pushing boundaries in graphics and gameplay. Best known for developing expansive first-person and multiplayer shooters such as Far Cry, Hunt, and Crysis, the independent studio’s games attract more than 30,000 players daily from around the globe.
The Challenge: Scaling Error Monitoring for a Growing Player Base
Ensuring a seamless gaming experience for thousands of concurrent players is no small feat, especially for an independent developer that lacks the resources of a major studio. As its player base grew, ensuring game stability became a critical challenge—one that its existing error monitoring tool struggled to meet.
Before Sauce Labs, Crytek relied on an inefficient error monitoring solution that the company originally developed in-house. The tool required time-consuming manual processes to collect and process error logs, creating a bottleneck that impacted the ability of developers to identify bugs and roll out improvements. The in-house tool required a full-time engineer to run and maintain it, pulling a critical resource away from game development.
As the studio transitioned from offline single-player games to always-online multiplayer games, Crytek discovered that its in-house tool could not keep up with the 24/7 demands of its growing player base. As the popularity of its games grew, so too did the time it would take to find and fix game-breaking errors. The longer its mean time to resolution (MTTR) became, the more the company noticed players quitting its games and leaving poor reviews.
If it didn’t do something to reduce its MTTR, the team feared its games would get deprioritized in app store search results due to excessive errors and crashes, which would have a direct impact on downloads and revenue.
“Before Sauce Labs, we had an in-house solution running in the background to report errors/crashes, but as players ramped up, the tool could not scale to what we really needed.” – Steffen Halbig, Senior Technical Producer at Crytek
The Solution: A Scalable, Integrated Approach for Error Reporting
Crytek knew it needed an error monitoring solution that could ensure stability while scaling along with its growing player base. In addition, the studio needed a solution that could integrate with Jira, which the studio uses to track bugs and assign tickets. Sauce Labs fit the bill.
“We knew that we could build a solution, but it would take a team of three people about six months. Sauce Labs helped us achieve value far faster to ensure game stability,” said Steffen Halbig, Senior Technical Producer at Crytek.
Crytek uses Sauce Error Reporting to help its team collect, triage, and resolve errors or crashes across its games. Instead of relying on manual logging, Sauce Labs automatically generates a Jira ticket as soon as an error is detected so developers can focus on fixing bugs instead of finding them.
In addition to live error reporting for its online games, Crytek also uses Sauce Error Reporting to optimize its internal play-testing process. Internal QA testers can load a specific game beta and test it using simulated real-world player loads, helping them identify critical issues without impacting actual players.
“We can now identify trends that help identify root causes and prioritize our top three errors to focus on before each update,” Halbig said.
The Result: Improved Stability and Increased Engineering Efficiency
Thanks to Sauce Error Reporting, Crytek was able to avoid spending months developing a new in-house tool and keep its developers focused on game development.
“Sauce Labs allowed us to free up one to three engineers to allocate for other innovative work and projects for Crytek,” Halbig said.
Crytek’s investment in Sauce Labs is also far less than what it used to spend on a dedicated engineering FTE for its previous solution, allowing the company to shift those resources toward other initiatives.
“The cost for Sauce Error Reporting equates to a saving of 3-4x for a single engineering FTE. In addition, Sauce Error Reporting helps make my team more efficient. It just works, and we get all the data we need to effectively find and fix crashes. I would absolutely recommend this solution to others.”
– Steffen Halbig, Senior Technical Director at Crytek
A Scalable Solution for Game Stability
Sauce Labs provides Crytek with a long-term solution that scales effortlessly with its growing player base. By automating error detection, integrating seamlessly with their existing tools, and providing real-time insights, Sauce Labs enabled Crytek to maintain game stability while freeing up valuable engineering resources.
“We’ve used Sauce Error Reporting for three years now, and we have never experienced an outage,” said Halbig. “Sauce Error Reporting is the best fitting solution for us now and we look forward to our continued partnership in the future.”
