An outsider profiled GTA Online's six-minute load times and found one bad JSON sort

GTA Online's notoriously long load times were a running joke among players: six-plus minutes staring at a loading screen before entering a game. In March 2021, a coder known as t0st got sick of it, took the game apart, and crafted his own fix.

The culprit was mundane: the way GTA Online's developers chose to parse and then sort the data in a large multi-megabyte JSON file. t0st's fix produced a roughly 70% decrease in loading times by his own informal benchmarks, and his write-up noted the core parsing and storing problem "shouldn't take more than a day for a single dev to solve."

Within two weeks Rockstar had contacted t0st, acknowledged that he had revealed a genuine improvement in the PC version's load times, paid him $10,000 under its bug bounty program, and committed to implement changes in a forthcoming title update.

Startup code that runs on every launch hides in plain sight — nobody profiles what has always been slow.

An inefficient parse-and-sort over a multi-megabyte file multiplies into minutes of player wait on every launch.

An outsider with a disassembler and no assumptions found in days what years of routine development never surfaced.

The slowest thing in your product may be one data structure nobody ever profiled — and sometimes only a customer with a disassembler will ever look.

Rockstar's statement to PC Gamer confirmed t0st "did, in fact, reveal an aspect of the game code related to load times" that could be improved, and said changes would ship in a forthcoming title update, though no timeframe was given. The episode became the standard citation for both community profiling and bug-bounty payouts in gaming.