Re:I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)
by terafo on Thursday June 09, 2022 @06:08PM
(#31687576)
Game was out for almost EIGHT YEARS by the time this bug was fixed. There can be no reasonable explanation for them not fixing that. 5 minute load every time you try to go into multiplayer. The amount of revenue lost to that one single bug is staggering. This bug was a reason why I never played GTA online, for example.
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Performance issues are one of those things that are easily waved off with broad explanations like "well there's a lot of assets to download", "their internet connection may be slow" etc. it may not have been clear to anyone at that stage that it was a "bug".
The underlying organizational problem then becomes the fact that performance isn't priority number 1. I would suspect that if the perf was taken seriously, some time spent on profiling would immediately reveal this issue.
Re:I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)
by jacobmischka on Friday June 10, 2022 @04:42AM
(#31691594)
Performance is not priority number 1. Number 1 is to ship the game on schedule so you can stop crunching for the first time in months, number 2 is to make an interesting game that people pay for and justifies your not getting laid off. The games industry is not a particularly safe place to be in from what I understand.
It is (probably) taken seriously, I am sure they were pushing things to limit to render just one more car or have a one more AI etc. My assumption the loading times just somehow slipped off and no one thought it was a solvable problem or it is just loading performance is not taken as seriously
> My assumption the loading times just somehow slipped off and no one thought it was a solvable problem or it is just loading performance is not taken as seriously
That does sounds like awfully like confirming that indeed no-one was curious, because they were too busy chasing KPIs or whatever other metrics management were using.
Re:I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)
by birracerveza on Friday June 10, 2022 @12:57PM
(#31696680)
If was the number one complaint about the game. R* is one of the biggest studios around. It would have cost them nothing to just hire a developer whose only task is to hound down that bug and fix it.
It could've been waved off if there wasn't single player part of that same game that loaded few times faster.
Re:I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)
by ScoobleDoodle on Friday June 10, 2022 @03:47AM
(#31691257)
That no one on the team maintaining the game looked into it likely means they don’t play the live game themselves. Developers and managers on up the chain.
Understandable given the heavy crunch it sounds like Rock Star works in. If you’re a developer spending 60+ hours a week working on it, you’re not going to play that in the few personal hours left over.
Your argument is a valid reason why this bug wasn't fixed when the game was first released. But no crunch lasts 8 years. And complaint about loading times were everywhere for all this time.
There are people that are paid to play the game (testers) or collect feedback from the people that plays it. Hard to imagine that they were oblivious to the problem
Re:I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)
by badlucklottery on Thursday June 09, 2022 @07:47PM
(#31688391)
>The amount of revenue lost to that one single bug is staggering.
The players who are still there are used to it so the value is likely near zero. It's the sort of thing that's 100% worth fixing before launch or soon after so you don't lose players in the first place. But the fix loses value every day it goes unfixed because you're already lost those load time-sensitive players. Keep in mind that years after release it still makes Rockstar/Take-Two millions per day (https://www.thegamer.com/gta-5-rockstar-2-5-million-per-day/) so I guess a lot of players just don't care.
For the record: I'm surprised anyone is willing to tolerate that shit.
Lots of people cite long load times as why they stopped playing GTA5. They are certainly making bank, but they also certainly left money on the table because those players who left could have still been there and spending money.
Them making a lot of money doesn't prove that they couldn't have made more money. Everyone knows better performance means better conversion which means more $$$.
It is definitely non-zero, I think since the launch of game the number of revenue lost to this single bug is in tens, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars. Considering that game made somewhere around 10 billions USD, 1-2% of total revenue lost to loading time seems plausible, given how horrible the problem was.
GTA Online player count statistics indicate 2.5 million GTA Online players every month. A reduction in total waiting time for all the players of 18.5 years every month.
That's assuming each player only logs once in a month, which is definitely not the case.