If some engineer at Rockstar had done this work, they would have gotten their regular salary and probably not much else, which probably would have worked out to less than $10k for the amount of time spent on this issue.
And yet, in practice, none of the engineers at Rockstar has done this work in 7 years and a half. I do not believe that it is fair to value *a posteriori* a one-million-dollar fix with "if" sentences.
Let us spin it differently: contact Rockstar before publishing the details of the fix, and offer to help them on this issue. How much do you believe that Rockstar would value the fix *a priori*?
The truth is this kind of fix is worth a lot, but it is always tempting for the company to be penny-pinching (and come up with justifications for being so) after the fact.
Engineers don't get to work on whatever they want (usually). The described problem doesn't stop people buying shark cards, the fix is not new content and players leaving the game because of it don't affect the bottom line significantly. This could be why the priority was low and why you should prioritise tech debt
A Rockstar employee would have had access to the source code probably. Running a profiler would have taken them significantly less time than the author.
As a company that's technically true. As an individual engineer they would probably have been sneaking time to work on it and have to be a pet project of someone senior enough to get it merged and released.
Let us spin it differently: contact Rockstar before publishing the details of the fix, and offer to help them on this issue. How much do you believe that Rockstar would value the fix *a priori*?
The truth is this kind of fix is worth a lot, but it is always tempting for the company to be penny-pinching (and come up with justifications for being so) after the fact.