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.)

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

There's the answer right there. They figure it's making $1B/yr, leave it alone. Maintenance? That cuts into the billion. Everyone moved onto the next project.

Or they fix it, see that their "in game time" average drops, and then back it out...

I would not at all be surprised if the long load time made for a sunk cost that kept people playing for longer sessions rather than picking it up for less than half an hour at a time.