15 ms·

The original fix’s author updated the post about this: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/ https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-G

• sdfhbdf 6y ago
  It's a really nice and wholesome use of HackerOne. Nice that they acknowledged and awarded as opposed to some companies that try their best to push a security disclosure out of scope and not pay out a bounty [0] [1] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9278832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9278832 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16000550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16000550
• rvz 6y ago
  > Rockstar awarded them 10k for it. The original post, analysis and the actual fix of this bug is beyond impressive. Strangely, Rockstar awarding $10k for that is like someone searching for lost treasure, identifies historical references which leads to finding a ton of it and somehow leaves with 1/8th of it, even though they did 98% of all the work. For that detailed effort, analysis and with a fix, I'd say that is worth around $80k. At least Rockstar was generous enough to award them in the first place; so I'll give them that.
  • PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    > For that detailed effort, analysis and with a fix, I'd say that is worth around $80k. No good deed goes unpunished. Rockstar went out of their way to thank this person and send them a check equivalent to several weeks of median developer salary. Can we not shame them for this goodwill gesture? $80K would be on the order of half of the annual salary of most developers outside of SFBA.
    • scrapcode 6y ago
      Half? I live in the Midwestern US. Have been dabbling in software for most of my life, have some decent working examples and am finishing my BS:CS this year. I can't even get close to my current salary in my current unrelated field ($85k) to even consider a career switch. Are the jumps from junior to mid-level/pm that high? I am a PM in construction so that may end up being my path.
      • srswtf123 6y ago
        As someone searching for employment in the Midwest, I feel your pain. I saw a position yesterday that wanted 15+ years of experience and paid, I kid you not, $17/hr. Compensation in the Midwest is a joke. If my family weren’t here, I’d return to one of the coasts.
        • wavefunction 6y ago
          They're looking to fill the position with a foreign contractor, almost certainly. I wrote some PHP sites 20 years ago and get contacted every now and then about taking a 2 month contract for $16 an hour writing PHP in Pittsburgh, which I'm sure has its charms but is also halfway across the country from me.
      • ecshafer 6y ago
        Junior to Mid level is pretty significant, even outside of the bay area. At a finance company, Junior to Senior for me was about $45k base salary over ~5 years, with another $20k in bonuses annually. If you can only find say a $70k job, I would think its not unlikely that you would be able to work 2 years at that, and jump for $90-110k.
      • dmix 6y ago
        The terrible smells, pretty sunset, and constant threat of petty violence in SF is offset with significant extra hiring fees.
    • burnte 6y ago
      80k is about the ANNUAL salary for most devs outside of SF.
    • gambiting 6y ago
      >>$80K would be on the order of half of the annual salary of most developers outside of SFBA. Lol, I'm a lead C++ programmer in the UK and I don't make that much. It's American salaries as a whole that are completely stratospheric.
      • verst 6y ago
        When you realize how high cost of living is in cities paying those salaries, how much education (for potential kids) is, how you must save for your retirement entirely on your own... and then of course insane out of pocket medical costs... you soon realize that when you adjust for lifestyle you may be in fact much better off than the person with stratospheric salary.
        • ncmncm 6y ago
          Right. A very, very ordinary apartment in NYC is $6000/mo. Figure 30-40% of your salary for taxes. If you made only $240K in NYC, your apartment would use up fully half of your take-home.
          • TMWNN 6y ago
            No "very, very ordinary apartment in NYC" costs $6000 a month.
            • ncmncm 6y ago
              What would be a very ordinary apartment anywhere else is considered palatial in NYC. NYC residents have got used to much reduced standards.
          • bscphil 6y ago
            Even assuming this is true ($6k a month sounds absurd), this is a bad argument. The old "rent should cost no more than one third of your income" rule is basically for people around the poverty line. For them it's a question of whether they can afford to eat that month. Just to give an extreme example: if Jeff Bezos uses half his income this year to build the largest estate the world has ever seen, he's still sitting pretty on the rest of it and has the largest estate the world has ever seen. At a 35% tax rate, your take home income is $156K. At $6K per month ($72K/yr), you have $84K left over after rent. If this is you then YOU ARE WEALTHY. There is simply no getting around this. You are making more alone, after taxes and after rent than my partner and I have ever made together total in a year in our lives, and we live in a city with a relatively expensive rental market and are not "poor". The absurd talk about "only" making over two hundred thousand dollars a year (plus whatever your partner makes if you have one) needs to stop. It's so out of touch with the norm in virtually every city in the world that it would be laughable if it weren't kind of sad.
    • krn 6y ago
      > $80K would be on the order of half of the annual salary of most developers outside of SFBA. If the author of the bug fix is indeed from Latvia (.lv), the median annual income of a senior software engineer in the Baltic states is currently around 30K-40K after taxes.
      • munk-a 6y ago
        Sorry is that number in Euros, USD or another currency?
        • krn 6y ago
          It's in EUR, since all the Baltic states are already in the eurozone.
    • wcarss 6y ago
      "It's one banana Michael, what could it cost -- ten dollars?"
      • cbozeman 6y ago
        "There's always money in the banana stand."
    • Someone1234 6y ago
      Edit: Nevermind misread it.
      • kortilla 6y ago
        we’re punishing rockstar for giving this dev $10k when there was no bounty program in the first place
    • astrea 6y ago
      > $80K would be on the order of half of the annual salary of most developers outside of SFBA. Wow, I need a raise.
    • paulmd 6y ago
      Rockstar will make tens of millions of additional revenue from increased player retention over the years (GTA Online is a massive cash cow, it is pretty much the original hyper-monetized game-as-a-service as a continues to fountain cash to this day), slow load times are an extremely commonly cited reason for marks (excuse me, customers) leaving the casino. This is a product that had made six billion dollars as of two and a half years ago, it is likely the most profitable entertainment product ever created, $10k is an almost insultingly low fraction of the value he created for the company. Better than nothing I guess, but suggesting that it's OK to exploit people because of where they live is kinda crass. This is an industry where you are (should be) valued based on what you can create, not where you live. To flip this around, if this guy lived in Haiti would you say it would have been fine to give him $1k because welp, cost of living is even lower there? Insulting. And again they had years and years they could have fixed this themselves, at in-house prices if they wanted to. They had to be shamed into it by a third-party developer pointing out their "could be fixed in a day by a single developer" tier mistakes. O(n^2) algorithms causing minutes-long load times, repeatedly reported by thousands of customers across the game's 10+ year lifespan. It's like giving a waiter a 1% tip. Is it nice that you gave them a tip at all? I guess. Technically nobody asked them to get you your food. Is it a reasonable fraction of the value delivered by customary standards? Not really. And in this case it's like a 0.01% tip.
    • pezezin 6y ago
      Dude, I'm currently living in Japan and $80k is almost double my salary, and I'm already above the national average and live pretty decently here. Disclaimer: I don't live in a big city like Tokyo.
  • Havoc 6y ago
    True. I’m glad he got anything at all. Game improvements generally don’t. Think of all the mods that exist just to fix bugs in say Skyrim
    • munk-a 6y ago
      They tend to get a lot of community accolades but yea - spending time fixing someone else's intellectual property isn't a great place to start your proposition if you want to make money. Even traditionally mod friendly companies will tend to sweep in and either block any derivative work that's monetizing their improvements or else negotiate with the creators to take the lion's share and republish the content under their company label. There are a bunch of examples of this but Counter Strike is a pretty famous one. That all said, it's pretty hard to argue that making minor alterations to a product should allow me to resell it as a novel work. Fan Fiction exists - but it doesn't (legally) exist as taking a novel and taking on a few new chapters then reselling it without giving a portion to the original author.
  • yanderekko 6y ago
    >For that detailed effort, analysis and with a fix, I'd say that is worth around $80k. Do you think the fix is actually worth 80k in terms of additional revenue for Rockstar? I wouldn't be so sure. If not though then no it's not worth $80k. "I'm a developer and I'm paid a lot to do my job, therefore everything I do must be very valuable" is not the right line of reasoning to use here.
    • keypusher 6y ago
      It’s absolutely worth that much and more. GTA5 Online pulled in well over $500 million in 2019, and even more in 2020. It’s now the 3rd best selling game of all time, behind only Tetris and Minecraft. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/69666/gta-made-half-billion-dollars-2019-3-best-earning-game/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/news/69666/gta-made-half-billion-d...
      • crazygringo 6y ago
        That's not a relevant number. The only relevant fact to justify $80K is -- would slow loading times have resulted in at least $80K of lost sales going forwards? Or at $50 a copy, then starting today would there be 1,600 people who would buy GTA V, but won't because they know loading times were slow? Maybe because a friend or reviewer mentions that as a con? (And you can also add lost DLC revenue from people who gave up playing earlier than they would have otherwise.) Honestly, that's an incredibly hard question to answer. But it is in no way obvious that it is "absolutely worth that much and more". In contrast, $10K is a nice round number that demonstrates gratitude for their charitable work. And keep in mind this was probably a weekend's worth of investigation or so. Not many months of dedicated work, which is what $80K buys on the job market.
        • jjmarinho 6y ago
          If the 500 million figure is correct, you would need only a 0,02% (1/5000) increase in spending for a change to be worth $80.000. Diminishing the notoriously bad load times of GTA:Online by 70% could probably do that. I actually never got into the multiplayer because at the time my HDD was taking several minutes to load the game.
  • f430 6y ago
    they could've given him nothing tho so im glad they gave him something. sure it would've been nice if it was more
  • viraptor 6y ago
    He got paid a good month salary for spending a bit of time fixing an issue (which is tricky but not extreme if you know re). I feel like people having strong opinions that's not enough should just open a GFM campaign to give him more and add their own money. It easier to say how others should spend.
  • httpsterio 6y ago
    That's basically 6x the average Latvian developer salary. The country the original developer is from.
    • httpsterio 6y ago
      6x their monthly salary*. In a lot of European countries, salary is always referred to by the monthly amount, not yearly.
  • hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    > even though they did 98% of all the work. You are forgetting the game which Rockstar made. A loading times fix is not 98% of the final product.
  • gustavpaul 6y ago
    This reminds me of my 13 year old sibling yelling at our mother when we were teenagers for not buying them the exact item they wanted, but something pretty close. Disappointing. One should not hold people responsible for acting "non-perfectly". Any behavior exceeding "average" should be met with admiration and gratitude, average behavior with "respect and appreciation", and anything somewhat sub-average with "mild disappointment but no surprise and some understanding". Having a company spend money they are technically obligated to allocate to share holders, to a developer who, without any pre-existing contract or even verbal or commonlaw understanding, helped them, is way beyond "average response" for modern businesses. Please, don't hate on the vanishingly small number of counter-examples blazing a trail in this space.
  • yarcob 6y ago
    I think this is a great example of a fallacy that's pretty popular on HN: That work should be rewarded based on "value created" rather than effort. I don't think this line of thinking is helpful. Should Amazon increase the price of their VMs if you made more money with them? Should a doctor charge a lawyer a higher price for a flu shot because their time is worth more? Of course not. Because in all these cases, the clients would just go buy someone else's service. Of course it is helpful to consider the value of the work you produce, and you can use that in negotiations. But you are not entitled to a higher rate just because your client is big or successful. If the developer had offered a two day consultation for $80.000 to Rockstar they would most likely have declined and said, sorry, for that money we can hire someone else to do a lot more performance improvements. If you want to get paid based on value created, you need to negotiate. But you don't have a moral right to get more money for the same effort just because your client is rich.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• nootropicat 6y ago
  >Rockstar awarded them 10k for it that's insulting tbh
  • Quillbert182 6y ago
    How is that insulting? They are under no obligation to give them anything at all.
    • BuyMyBitcoins 6y ago
      I honestly expected Rockstar to do nothing at all about the situation. I’m genuinely surprised they’d implement his findings and give him some money as well.
      • autoexec 6y ago
        At this point, I wouldn't have been surprised if a video game company sued someone for DMCA violations for something like this. Rockstar and Take-Two in particular are no strangers to handing out DMCA take downs, cease and desist letters, or lawsuits. I'm glad they're being cool about this.
    • ncmncm 6y ago
      Maybe you were not aware that GTA has taken in a billion dollars? Or don't know what that number means? Most people don't: <https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/>
      • ineedasername 6y ago
        Maybe you don't realize that taking in $1B means they were doing just fine without this bug fix. Faster load times amount to "Oh isn't that's nice". After reading his account of finding this, how long do you think it took him? 10 hours? 20? 40? That's $250 to $1000/hour for something he did out of curiosity.
        • 6y ago
• dang 6y ago
  Recent and related: How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 - Feb 2021 (697 comments)
  • anonytrary 6y ago
    It's funny because reducing load times by 70% is almost certainly worth way more than $10k if calculated.
    • josephg 6y ago
      I can see both sides of this. On one side, yeah - the work he did will be worth a lot more than $10k to Rockstar. They've had lots of people complain about & stop playing GTA online because of the slow loading times. And this issue would probably never be found or fixed otherwise. On the other hand, he did it for fun (without any expectation of reward). $10k isn't massive and we can quibble over the reward amount, but its delightful that companies are rewarding people at all for fixes like this. A few years ago he'd be lucky to get sent a GTA t-shirt. Its definitely the right direction we should be moving in - bug bounties are a thing in security, and we should be celebrating any movement toward rolling them out in other circumstances.
      • majani 6y ago
        And also they have to balance out internal politics as well. Putting massive incentives on the discovery of bugs could really mess up the motivations of internal staff.
      • jack_riminton 6y ago
        Indeed there were stories on that previous thread of people being banned for 'hacking' when they've pointed out flaws to game developers
      • wombatmobile 6y ago
        > On the other hand, he did it for fun This might be an argument for him to console himself (or just keep smiling) in the event that he received nothing. It isn't a valid consideration for Rockstar, which should take heed of the calculus you stated with your first hand only, because for the beneficiary of a windfall, karma awaits.
• dmix 6y ago
  Note: he lists his address as living in Latvia. Still I’d give him more for the significance and PR. But these things tend to be fixed rather than subjective for a reason. https://github.com/tostercx https://github.com/tostercx
• xwdv 6y ago
  The only reason he got paid at all IMO was the widespread exposure the original article got. When you find something this significant you’re almost obligated to do a song and dance and tell the world about it, so you can get the attention you need and be paid. Frankly for an introvert with no public online presence or audience that’s just not very appealing. There’s easier ways for software developers to make $10k: just wait for two paychecks.
  • jgwil2 6y ago
    I think the author was motivated by intellectual curiosity rather than money. Thankfully he was enthusiastic enough about it to share it with the rest of us.
• sundvor 6y ago
  That's fantastic. Hopefully a few coffees as well, from that amazing write up. :)
  • tinus_hn 6y ago
    Hot coffee is banned at Rockstar
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• user32456 6y ago
  That's awesome! I didn't think Rockstar would act on it.