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Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

I tried playing GTA online once and actually gave up due to the loading times (on a top end gaming rig)

I can't believe I'm alone, I wonder how much this cost rockstar

Think about how many human lifetimes worth of extra minutes were wasted from everyone waiting for this x number of players X years this has been a problem. Even if you can’t implement bubble sort on a whiteboard in your sleep, 5+ minute load times should have been setting off alarm bells in many engineers heads. I’m sure this did actually cost R* real money. Bounce rates for websites increase 32% for 1s vs 3s load times, according to Google: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and... Obviously we don’t have public data on it but I’m quite sure that some at least some people got frustrated with waiting and just stopped playing.

If you think about it, those lives actually were saved. People either didn't play the video game, or they spent a moment in the loading screen in quiet contemplation.

To play devil's advocate we should balance those out with the impatient gamers who acted out aggressively (e.g. the 100th time proceeded to kick a PC, smaller family member, throwing a mouse across the room, etc) or consumed more unhealthy snacks/drinks :(

I personally was often frustrated waiting several minutes, thankfully I don't have any violent tendencies, snacks on the other hand... :/

We are in the era where its impossible to be bored. In the elevator? Phone out on instagram. Loading screen? Same thing. Instant dopamine the minute you need a drip. The playerbase clearly doesn't care. To be honest, these loading screen times are as bad as they've always been for console games (especially considering it was only a generation ago that they ran off a disc).

From complaints I saw online, users emphatically cared. It was a common complaint, and some users would report that the load times would deter them from playing the game.

Your comment reminded me of this:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

Not much, the GTA5 online scene is alive and well. Considering they've sold this game over the course of three generations makes me believe they've made a mega flipton of money off this game.

I know so many people that have stopped playing due to the loading times. Just because a scene is active and alive, doesn't mean it couldn't be even more active and alive with such a minor fix that could be implemented within a day.

I am pretty sure they lost >100.000.000$ by that. Just shows how shitty the management over there is that they never tried fixing that problem.

By the time you get to the loading screen they've already profited. The fact that they continue to sell the same game over and over means individuals have likely purchased the game multiple times meaning they don't care about loading times, they just like the game.

It's easy to say their management is shitty from the comfort of your computer, but the reality is Rockstar produces great games, and they're making a ton of money because there games are good. I find most multiplayer games have a start up cost, glad they shortened it, but I don't think it's stopped anyone from playing that really wants to play.

https://www.thegamer.com/gta-5-rockstar-2-5-million-per-day/ https://www.tweaktown.com/news/80912/grand-theft-auto-made-o...

The action is, as always, on the margins. Those people who kind of wanted to play but got frustrated at the load times, you want them. In some senses you care more about them, the people you can gain or lose with changes, than your more committed users who are a little bit locked in.

GTA V has sold, and continues to sell, amazingly well. But Online, where this slowdown was exclusive to, is the real moneymaking engine. Any little marginal push to keep people out of Online, from feeling they could just jump in whenever, was significant.

The real baffler to me is just thinking about all the time spent by people internal to Rockstar sitting on that same screen.

My statement is mostly based on the assumption that a large part of their revenue is based on microtransactions, for which satisfied customers are key. Therefore if I stop playing due to the loading times, they effectively loose money since I certainly won't buy any in-game money with my real money. But you are of course right that I have already bought the game.

Regarding the management: If it takes >5 minutes on top high-end gaming rigs to load a game and if your loading times have become a meme in the internet, I think a somewhat reasonable product manager should ask their developers to at least invest 5 minutes in figuring out why it takes so long (that's probably about the time needed to figure it out given the tools the developers have) and if it can be decreased in a reasonable amount of time. I was just amazed by how simple the problem actually was for an issue that has led me and many others to stop playing. (And I actually really wanted to play, but I just didn't want to look 15 minutes at loading screens for having 5 minutes of actual playtime.)

> they've made a mega flipton of money off this game.

It can be simultaneously true that they made a lot off the game && with lower loading times they could have made even more. In-game microtransaction ARPU scales with playtime. >4 min per session spent waiting to load instead of playing == lost rev.

My exact same experience. As to what it cost, in the old world paradigm I'd say "nothing, we already bought the game", but I guess these days there's probably a decent argument for a cohort of people who are too impatient to wait to get into the game and who pay extravagant sums of real-world money to get in-game items immediately.

yes, GTA online's business model is making you buy in-game currency and paid DLC

which is kinda hard if the game takes 30 minutes to load

There's other costs: how many times per day to R* devs & testers have to go through the same loading? How many man-hours wasted? How many compute resources wasted? How many upgrades were justified by "I need better hardware to get my job done in a timely manner"?

Same. Asking around why players tolerate it, the anecdotal conclusion I’ve got is that what makes these frequent and extremely slow loads tolerable is playing with friends on audio chat.

The same thing happened to me. GTAO earns billions/year, crazy that "fix the insane loading times" didn't bubble up to their top-priority.

Probably nothing. Loading times in rockstar games on consoles have always been this bad. GTA4 was just as bad too.

You're probably wrong. I remember e-commerces trying to quantify how many millions of dollars they would lose when clicking would take too much time on their websites.

EDIT: things like https://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cos...

> Amazon’s calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google has calculated that by slowing its search results by just four tenths of a second they could lose 8 million searches per day

That's ecommerce. This is a video game and a unique one at that, so there are other factors at play. I don't think many people go "game took forever to load, guess I'll play for less time then." There could even be a bullwhip effect, a long load time might make you want to stay playing for a longer period of time.

> I don't think many people go "game took forever to load, guess I'll play for less time then."

Ive quit some online games that take too long to load. Matchmaking times that are too long make me quit games.

the load times were soooooo bad. Insultingly bad. It doesnt seem like you understand the true extent to how horrible rockstar managed this issue. I definitely quit playing for exactly this reason, even at the expense of spending less time with a good friend who i played with. Rockstar is a garbage disrespectful company for allowing this to go on for so long.

From personal experience I can't disagree more with you. I tend to play video games that have less loading time and tutorials because I just don't have the time to play and when I want to play I don't want to sit and wait for what will be mostly a 10-20min session.

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