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Comment by sailingparrot | Hacker News Reader

How is this different from the meme about designer not getting paid but instead being rewarded "with exposure"?

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.

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As a developer almost anything you do is worth far more than what you are paid for. I agree "exposure" is never a proper payment, but I think acknowledgement from Rockstar is a bit more legit along with the 10k cash, which I bet he never imagined he would get.

> What he did was worth a fuck ton of money to rockstar

[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...

> How many people do you think are gonna go out and buy it [...] because it loads faster

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.

> is still selling at a staggering 20M copies a year

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?

> Looking at their 2020 sales numbers and assuming they will be the same in 2021 is a very bad idea....

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.

> You seem to be treating "people" as if we are talking about a single person. People are not a coherent set

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 :)

It's different because Rock Star was doing fine without this guy and they didn't ask him to do anything.

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