Think about how many human lifetimes worth of extra minutes were wasted from everyone waiting for this x number of players X years this has been a problem. Even if you can’t implement bubble sort on a whiteboard in your sleep, 5+ minute load times should have been setting off alarm bells in many engineers heads. I’m sure this did actually cost R* real money. Bounce rates for websites increase 32% for 1s vs 3s load times, according to Google: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and...
Obviously we don’t have public data on it but I’m quite sure that some at least some people got frustrated with waiting and just stopped playing.
If you think about it, those lives actually were saved. People either didn't play the video game, or they spent a moment in the loading screen in quiet contemplation.
To play devil's advocate we should balance those out with the impatient gamers who acted out aggressively (e.g. the 100th time proceeded to kick a PC, smaller family member, throwing a mouse across the room, etc) or consumed more unhealthy snacks/drinks :(
I personally was often frustrated waiting several minutes, thankfully I don't have any violent tendencies, snacks on the other hand... :/
We are in the era where its impossible to be bored. In the elevator? Phone out on instagram. Loading screen? Same thing. Instant dopamine the minute you need a drip. The playerbase clearly doesn't care. To be honest, these loading screen times are as bad as they've always been for console games (especially considering it was only a generation ago that they ran off a disc).
From complaints I saw online, users emphatically cared. It was a common complaint, and some users would report that the load times would deter them from playing the game.
