A Gamer Fixed GTA's Loading Screen For Free
In 2021, a player found why GTA Online took 6 minutes to load, cut it by 70%, and Rockstar paid him $10,000.
The script
G T A Online took six minutes to load... until one player fixed it, without the source code.
For seven years, millions of players just sat and waited.
Then in twenty twenty-one, one fed-up player opened the game up himself.
He found the C P U stuck on one job... reading a single ten megabyte file.
You see, for each of sixty-three thousand items, the code scanned the whole file again.
He patched it, and loading dropped by seventy percent.
Rockstar checked, fixed the game... and paid him ten thousand dollars.
All because nobody had asked why...
The facts, checked
- GTA Online launched in 2013. In February 2021 a player known as t0st profiled the PC version and found the load was CPU-bound on a 10 MB JSON file with about 63,000 items.
- The parser (via `sscanf`) re-measured the whole string for every item, and a duplicate check walked the full list each time. His patch cut loading from 6:00 to 1:50, almost 70%.
- Rockstar confirmed it, shipped a fix, and paid him $10,000 through its bug bounty (March 2021).
