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.