Another datapoint that supports your argument is the Grand Theft Auto Online (GTAO) thing a few months ago.[0] GTAO took 5-15 minutes to start up. Like you click the icon and 5-15 minutes later you're in the main menu. Everyone was complaining about it for years. Years. Eventually some enterprising hacker disassembled the binary and profiled it. 95% of the runtime was in `strlen()` calls. Not only was that where all the time was spent, but it was all spent `strlen()`ing the exact same ~10MB resource string. They knew exactly how large the string was because they allocated memory for it, and then read the file off the disk into that memory. Then they were tokenizing it in a loop. But their tokenization routine didn't track how big the string was, or where the end of it was, so for each token it popped off the beginning, it had to `strlen()` the entire resource file.

The enterprising hacker then wrote a simple binary patch that reduced the startup time from 5-10 minutes to like 15 seconds or something.

To me that's profound. It implies that not only was management not concerned about the start up time, but none of the developers of the project ever used a profiler. You could just glance at a flamegraph of it, see that it was a single enormous plateau of a function that should honestly be pretty fast, and anyone with an ounce of curiousity would be like, ".........wait a minute, that's weird." And then the bug would be fixed in less time than it would take to convince management that it was worth prioritizing.

It disturbs me to think that this is the kind of world we live in. Where people lack such basic curiosity. The problem wasn't that optimization was hard, (optimization can be extremely hard) it was just because nobody gave a shit and nobody was even remotely curious about bad performance. They just accepted bad performance as if that's just the way the world is.

[0] Oh god it was 4 years ago: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

I just started getting back into gaming and I'm seeing shit like this all the time. It's amazing that stuff like this is so common while the Quake fast inverse square root algo is so well known.

How is it that these companies spend millions of dollars to develop games and yet modders are making patches in a few hours fixing bugs that never get merged. Not some indie game, but AAA rated games!

I think you're right, it's on both management and the programmers. Management only knows how to rush but not what to rush. The programmers fall for the trap (afraid to push back) and never pull up a profiler. Maybe over worked and over stressed but those problems never get solved if no one speaks up and everyone is quiet and buys into the rush for rushing's sake mentality.

It's amazing how many problems could be avoided by pulling up a profiler or analysis tool (like Valgrind).

It's amazing how many millions of dollars are lost because no one ever used a profiler or analysis tool.

I'll never understand how their love for money makes them waste so much of it.

> To me that's profound. It implies that not only was management not concerned about the start up time, but none of the developers of the project ever used a profiler.

Odds are that someone did notice it during profiling and filed a ticket with the relevant team to have it fixed, which was then set to low priority because implementing the latest batch of microtransactions was more important.

I feel like this is just a natural consequence of the metrics-driven development that is so prevalent in large businesses nowadays. Management has the numbers showing them how much money they make every time they add a new microtransaction, but they don't have numbers showing them how much money they're losing due to people getting tired of waiting 15 minutes for the game to load, so the latter is simply not acknowledged as a problem.

iirc this bug existed from release but didn't impact the game until years later after a sizable number of DLCs were added to the online mode, since the function only got slower with each one added. Not that it's fine that the bug stayed in that long, but you can see how it would be missed given that when they had actual programmers running profilers at development time it wouldn't have raised any red flags after completing in ten seconds or whatever.

> It disturbs me to think that this is the kind of world we live in. Where people lack such basic curiosity. The problem wasn't that optimization was hard, (optimization can be extremely hard) it was just because nobody gave a shit and nobody was even remotely curious about bad performance. They just accepted bad performance as if that's just the way the world is.

The problem is, you don't get rewarded for curiosity, for digging down into problem heaps, or for straying out of line. To the contrary, you'll often enough get punished for not fulfilling your quota.

> and anyone with an ounce of curiousity would be like, ".........wait a minute"

I see what you did there ;)

> Another datapoint that supports your argument is the Grand Theft Auto Online (GTAO) thing a few months ago.[0] GTAO took 5-15 minutes to start up. Like you click the icon and 5-15 minutes later you're in the main menu. Everyone was complaining about it for years.

I see this is a datapoint, but not for your argument. This thing sat in the code base didn't cause problems and didn't affect sales of the game pre or post GTAO launch.

This sounds a lot like selection bias. You want to enhance airplanes that flew and returned. Rather than those that didn't come back.

Let's say they did the opposite and focused on improving this over a feature or a level from GTA. What level or what feature that you liked could you remove to make way for investigating and fixing this issue? Because at the end of the day - time is zero-sum. Everything you do comes at the expense of everything you didn't.

Honestly the GTA5 downloader/updater itself has pretty bad configuration. I wrote a post about it on Reddit years ago along with how to fix it.

I don't know if it's still applicable or not because I haven't played it for ages, but just in case it is, here's the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/GTAV/comments/3ysv1d/pc_slow_rsc_au...