Rockstar pays $10k to modder who fixed GTA Online loading times
gamesindustry.biz
gamesindustry.biz
Personally I am not so convinced this persons reputation will earn them millions, but I can imagine it to be a reasonably valuable resume point
I think people over estimate how valuable reputation is. It can open doors but that is all. Being the guy who reduced loading times in GTA may get some VC interest but that doesn't automatically equate to making any money. It may get you a job and get you paid a few thousand more than usual. But honestly, I've never seen one of these famous devs make lots of money. They'll get offered CTO roles but that's been the max.
The other person was much better match for a small company / startup.
I haven't been at any that have cared (none of my past jobs' have been FAANG, but several have been in the over 10k employees size.)
*SOME* potential colleagues care, and a VERY FEW managers care that you know that, but I have found that to be the exception.
My tech lead actually helped me by saying that the trick is that instead of trying to speed up my own code base (which was really hard), it's easier to find something to improve outside my change to balance for the 0.1ms impact inside the same experiment.
edit: actually, nevermind. I realize you're probably referring to the hashmap lookup part, rather than the strlen() part?
GTA V came out 8 years ago, it had to run on the base PS4/Xbox One not to mention the PS3 and 360 these were the systems it was first validated on.
It also had much much less content at the time.
As the game released on PC and the amount of content grew the loading times didn’t regress but they also didn’t improve.
So when your benchmark is a console that loads a game in 5-10 minutes no one probably spent any time investigating what the bounds on a modern PC with PCIe storage should be.
His tweet:
Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.
Are there other notable cases of people who got turned down in spite of - or because of - their extensive knowledge in a case like this?
[0] https://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/
> Does your game take forever to start? Your lazy devs say there's nothing to be done about it? Just give us a call! As seen on hackernews.
Or more likely, no one had time to look. I keep see people acting like not fixing something is because the devs don't care. More often than not it's because we're being told to do something else instead.
"I don't have time to do it myself" is probably a very common reason why consultants are hired.
Or maybe this was a case of a rare low-hanging fruit lying around for someone to find. Maybe the entire software industry is not one giant low hanging fruit waiting for the right genius to emerge and pick.
And yes, there are many code bases where performance isn't prioritized in all areas, and one totally can expect a skilled engineer coming in to look at performance to find nice speed increases here and there. Not because they are magically better than everyone else, but because a) they are given the freedom to spend time on it where nobody else has been and b) because they are possibly more familiar with approaches and tooling than a dev that hasn't had the opportunity to prioritize performance. All your examples likely do have such people available, and thus bringing someone in is less likely to find something really juicy, unless they have some blindspot. Large game projects for sure have performance experts, but maybe they primarily spend their time on in-game performance and initial resource loading was a blind spot. Maybe that's a common blind spot. And outside games that's commonly waaay worse - performance isn't prioritized, and to be fair the fact that slower-than-necessary software usually sells just as well makes that understandable economically for a long time. But also makes it difficult if it gets to the point where it should/must matter.
In my experience, YES! It is often the new set of eyes (especially if they are on a a smart head with lots of time, energy and will available) that finds new solutions, optimizations and bugs we never thought about. And the people I work with are the smartest people I have ever met and that still is nowhere near enough to ensure that the large scale software projects we work on have had all the possible large optimizations done already.
Opening closed doors is frequently THE thing that changes a persons circumstances. Anyone who's been ghosted by an application process can attest to that. You can (interview) prepare all you want, but if you can't get in front of someone it won't matter.
I don’t think this point is valid anyway. He got exposure prior to actually got the acknowledgment and money. And he probably won’t have got either if the story didn’t get so viral.
Loading times in GTAO have been slow for years, and despite that it's been hugely successful. People (e.g. me) have bought multiple copies of the game, on multiple platforms, despite knowing it loads slowly in multiplayer. I'm not sure I would have bought more copies, or more DLC, if it were any faster. It's entirely possible that people don't care enough about load times enough to not give Rockstar their money. So how much is it actually worth to them?
I'm not saying $0. I'm not saying $10k. I'm saying I don't know, and I suspect nobody else does either, as of right now. So, for people saying he should get more money, what is the basis for determining that value?
What he did can, maybe, potentially, eventually, net him a lot of money if he does this and that. Sure, but maybe he doesn't want to start a company and spend his time looking for customers? Or maybe he has an actual need for real money right now and not hypothetical money in the future?
What he did was worth a fuck ton of money to rockstar, so yes 10k is very low, and the fact that he might maybe make up for it in the future if he lives like you want him to does not change that.
In my opinion the only argument that can be made for that 10k, is simply that rockstar never asked for any help and never had any bounty open, so anything they want is fair.
[dubious - discuss]
Remember, this is an 8 year old game that has already been purchased by 2% of the global population[1]. How many people do you think are gonna go out and buy it - or spend more on microtransactions - because it loads faster?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/09/take-two-ceo-grand-theft-aut...
Probably not a lot, although this game is still selling at a staggering 20M copies a year, so there is probably something to be said here.
> How many people do you think are gonna [...] spend more on microtransactions - because it loads faster?
Probably a lot. GTA is raking an enormous amount of cash from microtranscations, more than 500M$ a year and it is still growing. That 2% of the population already bought the game is irrelevant, what really matters is what percentage of the current player base will come back, or simply play more thanks to this patch? Even if you think it's just 1%, that's a huge boost in mostly recurring revenues, and I would bet hard that there isn't just 1 gamer over 100 that would be bothered by 3-7 minutes loading time to the point of not (or barely) playing anymore, I know I cannot stand that.
You can also do a search on the GTA Online subreddit for anything related to loading complaints, you will drown in results.
So yes, I think this is worth a fuck ton of money.
Looking at their 2020 sales numbers and assuming they will be the same in 2021 is a very bad idea....
> That 2% of the population already bought the game is irrelevant
You have a very strange definition of irrelevant.
> what really matters is what percentage of the current player base will come back, or simply play more thanks to this patch
Indeed, that is what really matters. That was kinda the point of my whole comment.
Your own point, that it's making so much money despite the loading times, is the problem with that theory. If people were so upset by the loading times - why did people keep buying and playing the game so much?
Look at that number how you want, they are selling more now than ever, and even if we assume that 2021 will be equal to their worst year, that's still 10M copies of the game. Do you really think that single improvement won't be responsible for an increase of sales of more than 0.0033%?
> Your own point, that it's making so much money despite the loading times, is the problem with that theory. If people were so upset by the loading times - why did people keep buying and playing the game so much?
You seem to be treating "people" as if we are talking about a single person. People are not a coherent set, some have better hardware and have a loading time of 1 minute, some just like the game so much that they are willing to deal with 7 minutes of loading time, and some are so annoyed by that they stopped playing or only bother launching the game if they have more than 1h to play.
The fact that the game is making a ton of money today does not mean it can't make more tommorrow, and it does mean than even incremental improvements are now worth a lot: any improvement that result in 1% more play time probably translate almost directly into 1% more microtransactions. For those people that had 7 minutes of loading time, even if we assume a generous average continuous play time of 2 hours that is already +6% playtime.
If it really wasn't worh anything like you are trying to picture, then they wouldn't have bothered rolling out a patch with that change.
Again, just go look on GTA's subreddit, there are tons of post of people complaining that they are giving up on this game because of the loading time, so despite what you say, those people exists, and it's not just 1 guy.
Big software companies routinely invest millions for incremental improvements that are less significant than this, for product that make less money that GTA Online. I think you severely underestimate what this changes mean over that amount of money and such a large potential player base.
Nope. We're talking about an extremely large group of people. A few outliers in a sea of lemmings is not relevant.
> Again, just go look on GTA's subreddit, there are tons of post of people complaining that they are giving up on this game because of the loading time, so despite what you say, those people exists, and it's not just 1 guy.
Yes, because people complaining on Reddit obviously means everyone's quitting the game.
It's quite clear that you have no idea how users behave, so... bye :)
> Extensively marketed and widely anticipated, the game broke industry sales records and became the fastest-selling entertainment product in history, earning $800 million in its first day and $1 billion in its first three days.
If they now spent that money to let one of their presumably competent developers profile the thing for a few days or hours you could probably cut the loading time again by that much or much more.
This brings me to a general software gripe. Why do companies seem to love to ship products of unacceptable quality? There are many things I don't like about Apple, but is there anyone else who actually cares what they ship?
I can't speak to code quality, but have you used Pages or Sheets? They're both usability disasters. Apple doesn't seem to care to improve them.
Most people seem to accept the "meh, it's good enough" mantra. Perfectionism is considered a flaw - in programming we dismiss it as "gold-plating".
The bug was probably in a library, or perhaps in a library in a library. Probably written by a third party. Probably you don't have access to the source. Probably they don't care about your performance feature requests, and if they do, the response will be "we'll get that in the next version, next year".
As a developer myself, I can say that this kind of thing is usually the result of the developers being under immense pressure to finish an important project, leaving them no time or energy to even think about minor or moderately annoying bugs unless customers start pulling out their pitchforks.
But that's not what product & business prioritize, so it's not what we do. Occasionally we get thrown a bone and have a "quality week" which is laughable.
And this is at a respected company you've probably heard of and used. It's even worse at the smaller companies I've been at.
You can lessen the problem by reducing your scope or hiring more developers (with caveats), but at the end of the day, a single developer can only do so much work, no matter how competent and motivated they are.
As far as why ship bugs, it's because of the "just ship" mentality that has taken over. It's worth more money to get a buggy product in front of customers than to spend the extra time to fix it. There are few sectors of the computing world where there is enough competition to punish you for shipping bugs. What are you going to do, buy the other GTA game? They're the only ones who can make it. In the worst case, if there is a competitor, they will just buy them and shut them down.
Its likely there are multiple developers who care about loading times but who would fear for their performance appraisal if they said they would spend 3 days improving loading time and then spent 5 days improving loading time.
When you do go to your manager say something like "With a day's work I'll be setup and ready, and then I say we keep going until I fail to make it faster for two days in a row." Then you didn't fail, you just did what you could.
You say unacceptable quality yet it seems everyone accepts it.
Sorry I can't hear you over the noise of our money printer
Also, when a company gets large enough, basic things like this fall through the cracks because everyone is tasked with their small part of the project, and likely no one person was in charge of getting the load times down, or else they were and the load times were within “acceptable tolerances”. Maybe they even created a JIRA ticket to track the work to fix the load times, but once the product shipped, the priority of that worked dropped and it was never looked into again.
You can probably come up with a few theories, but what would be actually interesting is a study into the reasons the huge Rockstar dev team let that regression slip by. Do they do that kind of things in video game companies? Something akin to incident retrospectives?
Modifying the very subjective "unacceptable" adjective of your question into a more objective adjective like "low":
Because the market is not able/willing to pay for higher quality products. There are amazing high quality products (software, and hardware) for Medicine, Space and other domains. Real High quality software costs money; more money than what the average consumer would be willing to pay for it.
Would you be willing/able to pay 10x of what you pay for all the software and online services that you consume?
> The plan? Write a .dll, inject it in GTA, hook some functions, ???, profit.
> The plan? Write a .dll [that fixes dupe checking and adds caching to GTA's json parsing], inject it in GTA, hook some functions, ???, profit.
This situation seems different in that it is purely beneficial to Rockstar.
The 10k reward are a smart PR move.
The guy might have a miserable life if he is put to write C++ code under the Unreal framework under death-march after death-march schedules.
70% loading time fix = 10,000
This gives me hope that any incumbent could be easily usurped by a software company that values good work
Imagine going through all that effort into finding a critical vulnerability and developing a zero-click PoC exploit to jailbreak the current iDevice line-up and somehow end up selling it to Apple for $10k.
That is pretty much near to what you are seeing here with the effort into discovering this performance issue and providing a fix for it to Rockstar. Oh well.
* 70% was the amount of loading time the modder helped to cut.
Back when I was learning to find vulnerabilities and report them, I'd be lucky to get a box of swag. For VG companies, the usual compensation was some amount of free in-game currency or premium subscription for N months. That being said, I didn't ask for compensation anyway, so it was no skin off my nose.
The worst reaction was when I told my university that one of their websites had a broken link that gave you a zip of sensitive student information, and they threatened to call the FBI (in hindsight, I was probably talking to someone non-technical).
Rockstar makes about $600M annually off of Red Dead Redemption and GTA V. They basically gave him 9 minutes of their net revenue.
$10k is not nothing. Some companies would have responded to that fix with a lawsuit for hacking. It reads a bit low to me only because it fixes what was the #1 complained about issue from day one for the game, but it's better than a box of swag.