Did you read the article? Zero features needed to be cut, this is a 30 minute fix.

Building the engine alone takes 30 minutes after each change. You're not going to get anything done in 30 minutes. And the more you work on this, the less you're working on shippable features that make money.

In the mobile space, an app opening faster is so valuable you can make a career out of just that. I haven't worked desktop/console games, but having load times be 6 minutes longer than it needs to be, when you're trying to make money on ongoing microtransactions, has got to be losing you so much more money than the time spent fixing.

That's a fine argument, and I'm sure that if management knew they could get a 70% decrease in load times in exchange for focusing on this one area, they would have done so. But nobody knew. And discovering that would have been expensive.

I'll meet you halfway though: they should have had profiling sessions that pointed to the JSON parsing code as the issue. I imagine that all of their profiling efforts were focused on the runtime performance, not the load time. Simply put, no one did that profiling, and I don't fault them for focusing on runtime performance (which is where the real money is, as Cyberpunk 2077 demonstrated by not having it, and subsequently having their PS4 orders yanked and refunded).

You do realize Cyberpunk 2077 shipped running better on base PS4 than "critically acclaimed" Control by Remedy?

Cyberpunk 2077 ran so horribly on PS4 that Sony had to refund everyone who purchased it.

No, Sony pulled Cyberpunk 2077 after CD Project promised refunds and then forced Sony to do it on their end. Sony didnt like that.

Once again - Control by Remedy ran on base PS4 at 10 frames per second, TEN frames. Critically acclaimed, reviewers loved it and didnt tend to mention TEN frames per second on base consoles, not pulled from the store.

This feature would bring in millions of dollars on its own. When your customer base is earning you $1 billion per year a 1% improvement is $10 million per year. You could hire an entire team of 100 engineers for that salary just to fix this single bug.

> Which features would you cut out of the game in order to have fast loading times?

If this is a serious question, I'd say cut any of the new vehicles introduced in the last 2 years. None of them are nearly as impactful as this optimization. In fact, I am having issues imagine any individual feature at all that's as important as this fix.

I’d have to have been there, seen the list of features with eng estimates and trade offs, but yes I would have happily made the call to chuck one of them if it meant a measurably higher quality product, like this massive load time improvement. Hell, that zoom-out-zoom-in animation when you switch characters probably took as much time to code as it would have to fix this bug. I think anyone with good product sense and the balls to make a priority call that might get someone upset could make the right call here.

But after it's already made record-breaking profits and is a huge cash cow with recurring revenue. You could just say "hey, I'll hire one single contract developer to do these kinds of quality of life things" and make a fraction less profit.

> make a fraction less profit

Unfortunately this part often kills quality initiatives. Why fix bugs for your existing customers when you can deploy the engineering resources on a DLC or a sequel which will milk those customers for more? There is no more craftsmanship or pride in good work left in software.

"When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through." -Steve Jobs