How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

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.)

"Unbelievable" and "unforgivable" eh? It's a greedy attitude. Instead of viewing GTA5 as a success that's brought a lot of people happiness, you view it as a money cow designed to extract every last bit of profit – and time, since this bug caused 70% longer loading times.

Perhaps it's both. But you, sitting here behind a keyboard with (correct me if I'm wrong) no gamedev experience, have no idea what it's like on a triple-A gamedev team with various priorities. The fact that the game works at all is a minor miracle, given the sheer complexity of the entire codebase.

The fact that someone was able to optimize the obfuscated executable is a wonderful thing. But they weren't a part of the team that shipped GTA 5. If they were, they certainly wouldn't have been able to spend their time on this.

It’s ok to recognize a thing as a business success but a technical failure. In fact many software projects are business successes despite awful and unforgivable quality compromises. You don’t get to whitewash it just because the thing prints money.

This is what you'd need to decide. And then afterwards, it might not print as much money as you think it will.

It's easy looking at it from the outside. Not so easy from the inside.