How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

It is absolutely unbelievable (and unforgivable) that a cash cow such as GTA V has a problem like this present for over 6 years and it turns out to be something so absolutely simple.

I do not agree with the sibling comment saying that this problem only looks simple and that we are missing context.

This online gamemode alone made $1 billion in 2017 alone.

Tweaking two functions to go from a load time of 6 minutes to less than two minutes is something any developer worth their salt should be able to do in a codebase like this equipped with a good profiler.

Instead, someone with no source code managed to do this to an obfuscated executable loaded with anti-cheat measures.

The fact that this problem is caused by Rockstar's excessive microtransaction policy (the 10MB of JSON causing this bottleneck are all available microtransaction items) is the cherry on top.

(And yes, I might also still be salty because their parent company unjustly DMCA'd re3 (https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3), the reverse engineered version of GTA III and Vice City. A twenty-year-old game. Which wasn't even playable without purchasing the original game.)

is it really unbelievable? companies this big tend to prioritize hiring a shit ton of middlemen (VPs, project managers, developer managers, offshore managers) in order to avoid paying out for talent to build and constantly maintain the project. I guess paying a shit ton of money to 1 person to manage 10+ poorly paid contractors works out for them, accounting wise.

If one really examined the accounting for GTAO, I would bet that most of the billions of dollars that were earned in micro transactions went to marketing, product research, and to middle management in the form of bonuses.

Even if you view this as a business decision rather than a technical one, any smart project manager would realise a 6 minute loading time literally costs the company millions per year in lost revenue. (How many times have you felt like firing up GTA Online only to reconsider due to the agonising load time). I would guess this was simply a case of business folk failing to understand that such a technical issue could be so easily solved plus developers never being allowed the opportunity to understand and fix the issue in their spare time.

The people who observe the slow loading time already paid for the game, so I guess R* won't lose much revenue because of this nasty bug.