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.)

Something I've noticed in highly successful companies is that problems never get fixed because the sound of the money printer from the core business is deafening.

Our customer portal loads 2 versions of React, Angular, Knockout and jQuery on the same page? Doesn't matter, it's printing billions of dollars.

Rockstar's money printer is so loud that they don't care about problems.

Same thing for Valve, their money printer is so loud that they barely bother to make games anymore and let the Steam client languish for years (how did they let Discord/Twitch happen?).

Look at sharepoint. It's a total nightmare of a platform to develop on, but the people just adapted and built their businesses on it

What makes it a nightmare? Can you share a few issues you've run into?

The JS API is total crap. One has to use it to develop anything that gets a bit more complex, but MS chose to ignore things that exists in the ES standard (like normal iterators, wtf) for quite some time to preserve backwards-compatibility with IE. This make neither debugging nor any further exposure to the API any fun.