The Fan Who Fixed a Billion Dollar Game
01:40 · Point of failure
For seven years GTA Online could take minutes to load. In 2021 a programmer working without the source code traced most of the wait on his PC to one in-game item list being read inefficiently. Rockstar confirmed it, shipped a fix for the PC version and paid a bounty.
Editions
- Watch
- The episode on YouTube2:02
- Read
- The technical debrief on ZOF.aizof.ai
Incident
- Topics
- games · performance · profiling · scale
- Point of failure
- Nobody inside had measured where the load time was going, so one in-game item list read inefficiently went unnoticed for seven years.
Transcript
The ritual
A game made billions of dollars while every player waited six minutes for it to load. Then one anonymous fan fixed it from his bedroom. This is The Point of Failure, episode thirteen.
GTA Online. One of the most profitable entertainment products in history. And for seven years, its players had a shared ritual: press play... and go make tea. The loading screen was a meme. Everyone assumed it had to be that way. Huge game, huge world, long load. Right?
The outsider
In 2021, a programmer going by t0st gets curious. He cannot see the source code, so he does it the hard way: he watches what the game's own processor is doing while it loads. And he finds something absurd. Most of that six minutes is the game reading one list. A ten megabyte list of in game items. Read in just about the least efficient way possible, checking and rechecking the same text over and over.
The patch
He writes a small patch. His load time drops around seventy percent. Six minutes becomes under two. He publishes the findings. And Rockstar does the honorable thing: confirms it, ships an official fix to everyone, and pays him ten thousand dollars. For a bug that lived in a billion dollar product... for seven years.
Nobody measured
Point of failure
Nobody inside had ever measured where the time was going. Millions of players felt the problem every single day. It took one outsider who refused to accept that slow was normal.
Every failure has a story. Every story was preventable. I'm Kevin. See you at the next one.
Sources
How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%
The six minute load and the 69.4 percent improvement are the author's measurements on his own PC; the post records faster machines loading in about two minutes.
GTAV Title Update 1.53 Notes (PS4 / Xbox One / PC)
The 16 March 2021 notes list the loading time improvement under the PC section and thank t0st; the fix shipped to PC players.
CREATIVITY INNOVATION EFFICIENCY 2021 ANNUAL REPORT
Reports over 145 million units of Grand Theft Auto V sold-in; Take-Two does not publish revenue for a single title.
This violent videogame has made more money than any movie ever
The six billion dollar figure is MarketWatch's estimate, not a Take-Two disclosure.
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