It’s absolutely worth that much and more. GTA5 Online pulled in well over $500 million in 2019, and even more in 2020. It’s now the 3rd best selling game of all time, behind only Tetris and Minecraft. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/69666/gta-made-half-billion-d...
The only relevant fact to justify $80K is -- would slow loading times have resulted in at least $80K of lost sales going forwards? Or at $50 a copy, then starting today would there be 1,600 people who would buy GTA V, but won't because they know loading times were slow? Maybe because a friend or reviewer mentions that as a con? (And you can also add lost DLC revenue from people who gave up playing earlier than they would have otherwise.)
Honestly, that's an incredibly hard question to answer. But it is in no way obvious that it is "absolutely worth that much and more".
In contrast, $10K is a nice round number that demonstrates gratitude for their charitable work. And keep in mind this was probably a weekend's worth of investigation or so. Not many months of dedicated work, which is what $80K buys on the job market.
If the 500 million figure is correct, you would need only a 0,02% (1/5000) increase in spending for a change to be worth $80.000.
Diminishing the notoriously bad load times of GTA:Online by 70% could probably do that. I actually never got into the multiplayer because at the time my HDD was taking several minutes to load the game.
It's not about $50/copy, it's about lost revenue from GTA:Online which makes money off micro-transactions and continued spending from existing customers. And yes, I think it should be obvious that very long load times has made a significant number of people spend less time and money than they would have with fast load times.
