> 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.

▲ pjc50 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is the sort of thing that, if fixed early enough in the development cycle, actually net brings forwards development. Because every time someone needs to test the game they hit the delay.

(which makes it all the more strange that it wasn't fixed)

	▲	Ygg2 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> This is the sort of thing that, if fixed early enough in the development cycle Is it? It didn't become noticable until GTA got a bunch of DLCs. Sure someone might have spotted it. But it would take more time to spot it early, and that time is time not spent fixing bugs.

▲ godelski 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you have the logic backwards. You are saying it didn't cause problems, right? Well that's the selection bias. You're basing your assumption on what is more easily measurable. It's "not a problem" because it got sales, right? Those are the planes that returned.

But what's much harder to measure is the number of sales you missed. Or where the downed planes were hit. You don't have the downed planes, you can't see where they were hit! You just can't have that measurement, you can only infer the data through the survivors.

  > Because at the end of the day - time is zero-sum

Time is a weird thing. It definitely isn't zero sum. There's an old saying from tradesmen "why is there always time to do things twice but never time to do things right?" Time is made. Sometimes spending less time gives you more time. And all sorts of other weird things. But don't make the classic mistake of rushing needlessly.

Time is only one part of the equation and just like the body the mind has stamina. Any physical trainer would tell you you're going to get hurt if you just keep working one group of muscles and keep lifting just below your limit. It's silly that the idea is that we'd go from sprint to sprint. The game industry is well known to be abusive of its developers, and that's already considering the baseline developer isn't a great place to start from, even if normalized.

▲ Ygg2 3 days ago | parent [-]

> But what's much harder to measure is the number of sales you missed. Or where the downed planes were hit. You don't have the downed planes, you can't see where they were hit! You just can't have that measurement, you can only infer the data through the survivors.

Not really. There are about 300 million gamers [1] if you exclude Androids and iPhones. How many sales units did GTA V make? 215 million[2]. It's a meteoric hit. They missed a sliver (35%) of their target audience.

You could argue that they missed the mobile market. But the biggest market - Android is a pain to develop for; the minimum spec for GTA V to have parity on phones would exclude a large part of the market (most likely), and the game itself isn't really mobile-friendly.

Ok, but we have a counter example (pun intended). Counter-Strike. Similarly, multiplayer, targets PCs mostly, developed by Valve, similarly excellent and popular to boot. However, it's way faster and way better optimized. So how much it "sold" according to [3]? 70 million. 86 if you consider Half-Life 1 and 2 as its single player campaign.

I'm not sure what the deciding factor for people is, but I can say it's not performance.

> Time is a weird thing. It definitely isn't zero sum.

If you are doing thing X, you can't do another thing Y, unless you are multitasking (if you are a time traveler, beware of paradoxes). But then you are doing two things poorly, and even then, if you do X and Y, adding other tasks becomes next to impossible.

It definitely is. Tim Cain had a video[4] about how they spent man months trying to find a cause for a weird foot sliding bug, that's barely noticeable, which they managed so solve. And at that time Diablo came out and it was a massive success with foot sliding up the wazoo. So, just because it bugs you doesn't mean others will notice.

> "why is there always time to do things twice but never time to do things right?"

Because you're always operating with some false assumption. You can't do it right, because the right isn't fixed and isn't always known, nor is it specified right for whom?

[1]https://www.pocketgamer.biz/92-of-gamers-are-exclusively-usi...

[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20250516021052/https://venturebe...

[3]https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Counter-Strike

[4]https://youtu.be/gKEIE47vN9Y?t=651

▲ godelski 2 days ago | parent [-]

  > They missed a sliver (35%) of their target audience.

Next time you're at a party go take a third of the cake and then tell everyone you just took "a sliver". See what happens...

Honestly, there's no point in trying to argue with you. Either you're trolling, you're greatly disconnected from reality, or you think I'm brain dead. No good can come from a conversation with someone that is so incorrigible.

	▲	Ygg2 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Next time you're at a party go take a third of the cake and then tell everyone you just took "a sliver". See what happens... Fine, I'll concede it's the wrong word used. But: > Honestly, there's no point in trying to argue with you. Either you're trolling, you're greatly disconnected from reality Wait. I'm disconnected? Selling millions of unit (Half life) is amazing success and tens of millions is stellar success by any measure (Baldur's Gate, Call of Duty, Skyrim). But selling hundreds of millions (Minecraft, GTAV)? That's top 10 most popular game of all time. So according to you, one of the top 5 best-selling game in history is somehow missing a huge part of the market? You can argue a plethora of things, but you can't speculate that GTA V could have done much better by saying "you're trolling"/"no point arguing". And saying that optimizing the DLC JSON loader could have given them a bigger slice of the pie is incredulous at best. You're extrapolating your preferences to 6 billion people. It's like watching a designer assume everyone will notice they used soft kerning, with dark grey font color on a fishbone paper background for their website. And that they cleverly aligned the watermark with the menu elements.