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.
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.
The added value of the fix is in the upper 8 figures due to enormously reducing friction for players. If a consultancy was hired to fix the performance problem the cost would run over $1M. $10k is funny money to Rockstar.
In normal people's terms, if somebody did hours of labor that gained you >$10k, would you give them $10? That would be insulting, yet that's what Rockstar did.
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.
Oh my good lord that was a serious eye-opener. I’m not American but can’t imagine it’s drastically different in the UK. I’ve lost a huge amount of money in the last year and also my car decided to die on me, I’m currently scraping together 3 grand or so to get a new one at the moment. So many people I know are struggling at the moment too. Meanwhile Jeff Bezos is probably sleeping like a baby.
