I was going to say surely this has extremely diminishing or even negative return past 30-60 seconds, but then I remembered lots of people are willing to sit through 10 minutes of commercials to watch 20-30 minutes of TV. So I guess for the right type of customer it works?

But on network TV, 8 minutes of commercials are interspersed among 22 minutes of content.

Virtually nobody's willing to sit through 10 minutes of commercials straight.

The GTA thing is even worse than that; television doesn't air commercials before the beginning of the show!

Especially if you have to watch the full ten minutes first.

Then again, that's what they do at movie theaters...

I remember realizing I was 10-20 minutes into an infomercial instead of regular commercials late at night when I was young. I was probably distracted at the time but man did I feel stupid when I realized that it wasnt just a really long P90X commercial.

It depends on the channel, really. I remember once I was sitting at an eatery in the Philippines (basically a cafeteria with immediately-available food) and the TV just played commercials from the time I sat down until I left.

They either:

Found that they get more purchases BECAUSE of the long loading time, despite bouncing other players (the ad theory and happy coincidence for them to have the ad placement slots from shitty engineering)

The engagement team was told bullshit by the engineering team about how impossible it is to fix that issue

Or they are just making enough not to care

Or

the "engagement team" got fooled by longer session times

hahaha true, the a/b test showed them what they wanted to see and they never stopped to ask users if its what they wanted

“Roll that out to everyone!”

Could be, but I can imagine people giving up on GTA: Online altogether because it takes too much time to load.

> Could be, but I can imagine people giving up on GTA: Online altogether because it takes too much time to load.

Luckily for them, churn is usually a different problem solved by a different part of the team/org with different priorities and insights.

Yep this was me about 4 years ago. I distinctly remember sitting through the loading screen and being absolutely astonished at how long it took. I never fired it up again because I just couldn’t be bothered to wait that long.

I'm one that had pre-order bonus on GTA Online but gave up in part due to the loading times. If I have one hour to play I don't want to spend 10 minutes on loading screens.

It's funny to think that I would probably pay some amount to have GTA Online without these absurd loading times and without modders/hackers :D

But for the ones that don't, it equals a virtual commute, so it might be a good filter and the audience beyond that watershed is more serious about spending money there. ;)