Comment by nmfisher
5 years ago
Precisely. Hasn't GTA Online done over a billion in revenue?
Given how incredibly successful it's been, it's conceivable the suits decided the opportunity cost of investing man-hours to fix the issue was too high, and that effort would be better spent elsewhere.
They're making lots of money but the ridiculous load times absolutely cost them money. It's not worth an unlimited amount of dev time to fix, but they definitely should have assigned a dev to spend one day estimating how hard fixes would be.
It's costing them money just in the time wasted by their own internal QAs and devs loading the game to test it.
Arguably, it could actually make them money, since it provides a window of free advertising. I have no data either way, but I wouldn’t assume long load screens are necessarily bad for business.
They don't need more than a full minute of advertising every load.
N=1 but one of the reasons I don't partake in modern gaming is ridiculous loading times and mandatory update sizes.
That's also possible. I haven't played it myself, so I really can't comment.
Where does the belief that corporations are somehow perfect at doing cost-benefit analysis come from? Has anyone worked in a place where that seemed to be the case?
We're talking about an issue that has been loudly complained about for 7 years (and I am evidence that it makes people play the game much less often than they would like to) that some person without access to the source code was able to identify and fix relatively quickly, it would be surprising if it took an FTE 1 week to find this with access to the source code.
This is one of the most profitable games ever, they could hire an entire team to track this down for half a year and it wouldn't even be noticeable on their balance sheet. And I would bet money that it would have increased their active player base (which they care about because of the micro-transactions) in a noticeable way, as long as players were aware of the improvement so they would try it again.