GTA V Modder Paid $10,000 by Rockstar for Improving Loading Times
Modding isn’t typically thought of as an especially lucrative field, with most mods available online for free. However, one GTA V modder has just made a huge figure for their recent work, after being paid $10,000 by Rockstar itself. The sum was paid to the modder after their creation of a fix for GTA Online which cuts the game’s loading times by more than half!
Why Rockstar Paid $10,000 to a GTA V Modder
The modder in question, who uses the handle ‘t0st,’ posted an explanation of their work online. The post details how they identified an issue with GTA Online’s loading times and implemented a fix. According to t0st, they specifically discovered a bottleneck in the PC version of GTA Online which causes loading times to last significantly longer than they ought to. Their fix reportedly cut loading times by around 70%. Towards the end of their explanation, t0st advised Rockstar that the bottleneck; “shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve.”
While the explanation was initially unverified, it has since been confirmed as accurate by Rockstar itself. In fact, the studio will now be rolling out the fix as part of an upcoming update for GTA Online. “After a thorough investigation,” says Rockstar, in a statement made to PC Gamer; “we can confirm that player t0st did, in fact, reveal an aspect of the game code related to load times for the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved. As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update.”
As such, PC players of GTA Online can look forward to substantially shorter loading times in the near future! t0st has since revealed that Rockstar paid him a reward of $10,000 through the studio’s Bug Bounty program. Typically, the Bug Bounty program offers monetary rewards for individuals who discover security-related flaws in GTA Online; the sorts of flaws which might be exploited by hackers. Of course, in this case Rockstar made an exception, rewarding t0st handsomely for their discovery of the loading time bottleneck instead.