Bug severity
Also called: Severity, Defect severity, Severity vs priority, Showstopper
Bug severity rates how badly a bug hurts the game, from a crash or lost save down to a cosmetic glitch, separately from how soon it gets fixed.
Bug severity is a measure of a bug's impact on the product. Severity levels are not standardized and differ by industry and tracking tool, with labels such as critical, high, low, blocker and trivial (Wikipedia, "Software bug", accessed 28 Oct 2026). A bug severe enough to delay a release is called a showstopper.
Priority is a separate field. Severity says how badly a bug affects the game, and priority says how urgently it needs a fix compared with other bugs (BrowserStack, "Bug Severity vs Priority", browserstack.com/guide/bug-severity-vs-priority, accessed 28 Oct 2026). A crash in a menu almost nobody opens can be high severity and low priority. A typo in the game title on the main menu is the reverse.
BrowserStack's guide lists 4 levels: critical or blocker, major, minor and trivial. In game QA, critical usually covers crashes, softlocks, lost saves and a game that will not start. Testers set severity in each report, and the studio sets priority during triage with the launch date and the cost of the fix in mind.
Updated · Written by JJ, founder of Jumbo Jelly.
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Related terms
- Repro steps
Repro steps are the numbered actions that make a bug happen again on demand, written so a developer can trigger it without asking the tester anything.
- Softlock
A softlock is a bug where the game keeps running but the player can no longer progress, for example stuck in a room with no way out.
- Day-one patch
A day-one patch is an update released on or right after launch day to fix bugs found after the release build was locked or once players arrived.
- Regression pass
A regression pass retests features that already worked after a code change, to catch bugs the new patch broke in old parts of the game.