Although the angle of: Losing his characters is the best thing that's happening for him due to wasting a very significant part of his life in video games has some merit (but could be worded differently), this is yet another example on why you shouldn't depend on these platforms for anything of value, specially Google.
The immense pressure to transform/re-frame everything as a service, aka: "You'll own nothing and be happy" leads to these situations. Now it's "just a video game", but this is starting to happen to most walks of life.
> Although the angle of: Losing his characters is the best thing that's happening for him due to wasting a very significant part of his life in video games has some merit
It has no merit. Do you look at your hobbies as wasting your life? I certainty don't. My alone time playing video games is just as important to me as when I'm going hiking or camping with friends.
At what point does a hobby turn into an addition? People who have spent 6k hours in a casino, for example, would probably be happier if they could figure out why they're doing it, and find a more productive way to address that need. Same might be true of someone who has spent 6k hours in a single video game.
[I've spent 450 hours in Factorio, but stopped soon after my partner nick named it Divorcio.]
You can't measure an addiction just by total hours invested in something.
That equals 2.4hrs/day, 16hrs/week since the game was released, which might be more indicative but still depends on the reset of their life obligations and what else they seek value from.
The reason he plays RDR2 on Stadia is to play anywhere, so part of that is commute time, some work breaks, etc. In one of the replies, he shows his setup of a phone controller (Razer Kishi), scattered TVs at school, and his laptop. Also streams, so I'm guessing some of that time is that.
I agree it's a lot of hours but for a game you really like (with an online component no less), it's possible once you consider that it's probably instead of watching TV, reading, and other free time stuff. (I.e.: treat it as cumulative free time instead of "this one game is 6k hours")
I get 8h of sleep each day and work 40h a week. I commute 30m each way: 5h a week. Basic daily routines (grooming, dressing, cooking, eating) are 2h a day. I try to do at least 30m of exercise a day.
49.5hrs remain in my week.
Reduce that by another 39.55h. I have fewer than 1h30m available a day now.
I have not done any errands, have no food for the coming week, my clothes are dirty, and I have not seen or called any of my friends or family.
Imagine living that lifestyle for 1,046 days in a row.
(Truth be told, I'm positive sacrifices were made. Cut the exercise, order delivery, eat while playing, don't shower, etc)
Then again, not all of that time might have been spent actually playing. Perhaps that user enjoyed music from the game or left it on and running for some other reason.
I’ve got numerous games on Steam which have massively over reported “play time” because they are the type of game I leave running in the back ground and hop in between (or sometimes during) meetings. Rimworld is a great example of this.
This is entirely dependent on the person. Some people have to have something new every single day, and some people like to enjoy the same stuff. Some people try new beers every time they go out, and some people drink their favourite.
Years back, I spent roughly 20,000 hours in WoW, starting 2006 and the last time I played, a year or two ago. 20,000 hours doing the same stuff, one could argue, but those hours have brought me joy, relaxation, excitement, and friendship.
Downtime is important — how you choose to decompress is up to you, but it's important, especially with high stress or high pressure jobs. Some months you'll be putting in 80 hours a week, weekends included, and other times you'll lower it, to take a bit of a breather, 40 hours a week with some games or TV.
We shouldn't be calling people addicts because they go fishing every Sunday, or watch TV every evening, or, play RDR2 every day.
People under-estimate the effort that took. I ran guilds & raids for years, and getting 25-50 people to be motivated, on time, follow doctrine, train, perform, and be available over a schedule, without any pay, that takes something that a lot of companies could do with having.
The person is quoted in the article as saying they don't play story mode and that Google Takeout wouldn't work for transferring their game save to PC as a result. This means that they've been playing the online component, Red Dead Online.
Don't you sign into Rockstar Launcher / Social Club with a Rockstar account in order to play online? Can he not just log into the same game, same launcher, same account on PC and pick up where he left off?
I've played RDR2 singleplayer and I get a prompt about cloud saves every time I launch the game on a new PC.
If he's playing multiplayer, this should be even easier. Rockstar should have the savedata.
Stadia doesn't go through Rockstar Launcher. Stadia itself is the platform here, Google required custom-rebuilt versions of all these games for linux and for the stadia environment.
Yikes. If Google required custom builds of games, it seems like they ignored a lot of what's happening in the rest of the industry.
Proton is free, open-source, and strives for compatibility with Windows games. Could have used that.
They still get vendor lock-in either way (because you have to stream from _somewhere_) so making it worse in this fashion doesn't achieve any particular goal that I can see.
Stadia was released in 2019, while Proton came out in Alpha in mid-2018. It's highly unlikely it was available to Google when they started developing Stadia.
Furthermore, controlling the full platform has enormous advantages in terms of scalability, low-latency streaming and control.
and enormous disadvantages. Like costing hundreds of millions of dollars to build, and on top of that, spending hundreds of millions in payouts to studios to port their games.
The hubris to go ahead with something like this....
If it had worked, it would have massively paid off for everyone (Google and studios alike). Studios already have to develop special versions for the different consoles and PCs, what's one more? Google just needed to keep at it, invest more money (it's not like they don't have billions laying around) to bring studios in, and send strong signals they're serious (like promising to refund everyone in case of shutdown).
> so making it worse in this fashion doesn't achieve any particular goal that I can see.
I can see at least three goals it achieves:
1. It helped to establish the superiority of Google engineering (in the minds of Google engineers), e.g. "We can do it better because we're Google."
2. It helped somebody (or multiple somebodies) in Google get promoted.
3. It signaled to the market that even as a new entry into the gaming market that Google has a big stick to wield and publishers/developers will have to bend to their will, and /will/ do it.
He mentions in a followup tweet (to someone recommending using Google Takeout to retrieve his save file) that he doesn't play story mode, so I assume there is a multiplayer mode.
I had the same with Factorio, only I actually did get divorced. I went through many attempts to quit - including deleting my Steam account.
Eventually I set up the household to Mac & Linux only to help increase the friction. Along with a lifestyle overhaul - new hobbies, and actual sport played outside, non-gaming seems to stick.
Gaming addiction is real and it can truly destroy a life.
Funny enough, this is why I switched to Linux. In 2006 I was playing too many games (MMOs..) and not doing enough study at my course (was 16 at the time enrolled in an education you can go to after year 10 called TAFE here in Australia).
Haven't looked back since, barely play games anymore (I did go through a stint of WoW).
Amused Linux is super supportive of games now. :-)
One of the reasons I bought a Linux box as well, but can confirm Steam works well on linux now..
I "game" about a 2-3 hour per week gamer though I'll go a few months not playing at all.
Board games with friends works well on steam (tabletop sim/teraforming mars/wingspan and lords of water deep.. ).. with video chat back channel which is the best part. Black Mesa/Portal/Alien Isolation which work well on my intel/Nvidia based laptop from 4 years ago (PopOS).
With the steam deck being linux based, I suspect using linux will be better and better for gaming.
Exercise is the main one for me. Pick something progressive and addictive, like weightlifting or distance running. You’ll get hooked but there’s a built-in limit to how much you can do per day and per week.
I try to get out of the house on various adventures or even regular walks at every opportunity now.
Also I took up some hobbies like reading and photography. Some people golf fanatically and they seem to be better off for it.
At first, I unconsciously replaced game time with social media time, doomscrolling, news. Don’t do this. Be conscious and deliberate about subbing in quality leisure time.
The main thing is to treat games like a serious addiction if it is one, and replace it with a full and rich life. This is obviously not easy, but that is, in part, the point.
Hmm, this seems like a mixed bag. Exercise is great, but given your mention of it becoming addictive, it seems like you're replacing one thing with another - there are plenty of people who spend too much time in the gym, or marathon training, etc, to the detriment of relationships and other life responsibilities. People who are "fanatic golfers" often do so at some expense, both emotional and monetary, of their family. Replacing addiction with addiction is still addiction, albeit potentially better for your health.
> I like this rule of thumb to know if a behavior can be a psychiatric disorder: "when it interferes with normal functioning". It's purposely vague and subject to interpretation but it's a good first filter.
If these new "addictions" aren't interfering with "normal functioning", then they're not disorders. They're just normal parts of that person's life.
I like this rule of thumb to know if a behavior can be a psychiatric disorder: "when it interferes with normal functioning". It's purposely vague and subject to interpretation but it's a good first filter.
For an addiction X, you can ask questions like:
* do I think about X most of the time
* would I choose X over family/friends/health
* when engaged in another activity, do I want it to be done quickly so I can go back to X
* do I feel distressed when I can't do X
* ...
Looking years ago, my younger self has been addicted to WoW before realizing how little joy the game sparked when playing. And one day I just did not launch it and I was done with it. I certainly feel lucky to have been bored by the game before it did too much damages. Other additions are not so kind on the health/mind/wallet.
Your deathbed mindset is a pretty short time to have to endure to optimize your entire life around. Especially compared to the hundred or so years you have to live through.
Some people do spend 20+ years effectively on their death bed with little to comfort them but their regrets. Another way of looking at life is at 80 you can be of a sound mind but your body is only so healthy at that point. Yet a tiny fraction of people live another 40 years.
I personally don’t think it’s worth heavily optimizing for those potential last 40 years. But, they should be part of long term planning at least as something that might happen.
The length of time enduring these thoughts/feelings is not the point.
The point is that of the ways one chooses to spend those hundred or so years, people often find later in life that they wish they'd spent the time differently. They realize that they could have achieved much greater life satisfaction if they had.
I don't believe in a literal hell, but someone once posited (sorry, cannot recall who at the moment) that hell is the "eternity" of thought that occurs as your consciousness fades away. Those thoughts you're thinking are the last thoughts you'll ever think. People don't want their last thoughts to be filled with regret. People want to die in peace.
But the broader point isn't top optimize your life around the time you'll eventually spend on your deathbed - that's just where everyone ends up. The point is to optimize your life so that you are satisfied with life - something that is not limited to your dying hours.
Yeah, I get the point, but I stand behind what I said. I probably just worded it the way I did because it's click-baity. :-)
Thinking about your deathbed is really just another way of living in the future instead of the present. On your deathbed you have a completely different set of priorities and abilities, and there's no risk to the fantasy. Because you don't have to actually live it.
I definitely don't disagree within where you ended up. "The point is to optimize your life so that you are satisfied with life - something that is not limited to your dying hours." But I think this idea of reflecting back on an idealized life can be too heavily biased to be useful for some people (me maybe?) I think there's this notion of a sort of toxic ambition, which would be similar to the buddhist notion of living in the future. Seeing a lot of really high functioning artists, I think most reach the point where they realize it's not about the accomplishments, it's about taking enjoyment from the day to day practice of their craft.
But I played video games for most of my youth, and certainly I reflect back and think, maybe if I'd focused harder on school, and gone to a better university, I'd be in a better place now. Probably. But that's not who I was. Shit it's still not who I am. I reflect back fondly, but I just don't enjoy them anymore.
And that's sort of the point. Maybe you will look back and regret your life, but that feeling of regret is such a small part of it.
I think we're mostly on the same page, but not sure why click-baity is a feature?
> Thinking about your deathbed is really just another way of living in the future instead of the present
If you spend all of your time thinking about your deathbed, sure. But I'd argue that being cognizant of this period of time and planning ahead is not the same as living in the future any more than spending your weekdays focused on getting work and chores done so you can enjoy the weekend unencumbered is living in the future (or eating healthy foods, not smoking, getting your exercise, etc).
As with everything, there's a balance to be struck.
And for what it's worth, I'm a gamer. I still actively spend time playing games because I enjoy it, and I get to interact with some of my friends.
But I think spending a few minutes reflecting on whether or not one's habits are serving them well, and how they will feel about those habits years down the road is also warranted.
> ...but that feeling of regret is such a small part of it
My point is that regret doesn't need to be part of it at all, and once you've reached that point, there's no going back. Someone may reflect on their time spent in <game of choice>, and realize it's a net positive in their life. Someone else may realize they need to make changes. The only time that such a reflection can have an impact on the outcome of one's life is when it's early enough to still matter.
The point isn't that people should stop playing games, or that they should live their life in the future, but that people should reflect on life choices early enough to make changes if changes are warranted.
Why is it toxic? Throwing all your time into frivolous activity like video games is what I would say is toxic. This individual has been averaging 40 hours a week on this game since it was released.
In fact, building a valuable set of useful skills seems like the precise opposite of toxicity. Rather, it improves and adds value to your life.
If you value health and fitness, and then spend 4-6 hours/day exercising, despite the possibility of still gaining the primary benefits of exercise without spending so much time, how is this any different?
Aside from the health benefits, fitness enthusiasts do it for the community, the feeling of accomplishment, the personal satisfaction, and in some cases, literal addiction.
Those four hours/day on a bicycle don't seem inherently more valuable than three hours on a game and one hour on a bicycle. But someone spending four hours on the bicycle will be held above the person spending three hours on a game. Why?
The two activities can be strikingly similar in some ways (aside from the fitness outcome).
- Spending time riding/playing with other cyclists/gamers (community)
- Spending time riding alone (solitude)
- A sense of personal satisfaction at certain achievements (e.g. riding a century, or unlocking a rare achievement)
But aside from the personal fitness gained, spending an three extra hours on a bike doesn't seem intrinsically any more valuable than spending those same three hours on RDR2, if they're bringing the individual a sense of satisfaction.
I do think that this is all about balance, and as others have pointed out, addictions come in many shapes and sizes. I know people who are absolutely fitness addicts.
> building a valuable set of useful skills seems like the precise opposite of toxicity
Values are personal, and usefulness is contextual. I know plenty of people who have successful careers, make good money, and then sink inordinate amounts of time into their hobbies, some of which might not look valuable depending on your perspective. For such individuals, it's unclear why they must necessarily spend time learning more skills, and why that is valuable when the bases are already covered.
Exercising seems like the opposite of toxicity, but anything can become toxic if taken to an extreme.
Why is a fun activity toxic? Do you just avoid TV/movies too since they don't result in a valuable set of useful skills?
You don't have to be productive 24/7, you don't need a value justification for everything you do, and you don't need every expense (whether money or time) to result in a net positive cashflow or whatever.
most people spend their leisure time browsing mindless content on aggregators or netflix. this guy just really likes being a cowboy.
>building a valuable set of useful skills seems like the precise opposite of toxicity
eh, there's a limit. i spent past 10 years pretty much solely focused on gaining skills & career advancement and my one of my biggest regrets is not playing more vidya. i personally think work addiction is a bigger unspoken problem in society than game addiction. it certainly was for me.
If you are doing that either you are sacrificing your work, livelihood or personal relationships. It doesn't matter what for, it's an insane amount of time.
Not to mention the game in question has at most what... 100 hours of content ? it's not comparable in any way
> Poor guy gets money from the govt. == "a leech"; rich guy gets money from the govt. == "a stimulus for the economy".
Huh? That's the exact opposite of everything I've seen. Rich people are called leeches just for being rich, let alone receiving money from the government.
That's pretty easy to define. An addiction is something that you want or feel you should quit or tone down, but don't have the self discipline to do. A hobby, even an obsession, is not an addiction. And similarly it's entirely possible to become addicted to "productive" things, like work.
The Bezos-like individuals who have no lack of money yet still work relentlessly, even to the detriment of the other factors in their life, are a dime a dozen. And a person of his sort saying he wishes he could work less hard would be seen as little other than a humble brag, even if he may mean it absolute and desperate earnestness.
And getting slightly philosophical for a moment, I doubt there's anybody on their deathbed that would regret spending as much time as they did doing the things that they enjoyed, unless those things started to themselves cause even greater problems. And a playtime alone does nothing to inform one as to the chances of the latter. For some, 5 hours a week might start causing problems - for others 60 hours a week would be perfectly fine.
I think that's not the best definition of an addiction. Plenty of people that smoke aren't actively trying to quit or even want to quit, but they are very clearly addicted to nicotine.
It's the reason people have interventions: for a person addicted to something, it can be hard to actually admit that they're addicted to something. That should qualify, even if that person won't admit that their behavior has become a problem.
> At what point does a hobby turn into an addition?
Not sure about genuine addiction, but you can have an unhealthy relation with your hobby, e.g. when it becomes a compulsion or when it turns into some sort of broken coping mechanism.
But just as well you might find it fun, fulfilling, or treat it as a learning experience, all without losing your head over it. Also some couples might share a hobby, some might consider participating in said hobby their quality time.
But you know, you got to consider, is this an inherently disgusting, wasteful thing that you ought to be ashamed of? Or do you just feel that way because of other people think it is?
Like most things, the dose makes the poison. A little Red Dead is probably great, too much probably bad. Gambling, food, sleep all fall into similar U shaped curves.
Who are we to say how much is the right amount for this person? To play 6,000 hours of this game he must have a reason. Perhaps he's particularly passionate about it, perhaps there is someone in his life he loves to play it with.
I think that argument works a lot better if we're talking about a consumption level in the 10-100s of hours, along the lines of average for this title and most others like it:
6000 hours is multiple orders of magnitude beyond that point, so it feels like a point where it's a lot safer to reach for an absolute judgment that it really is "too much".
Fair, and I know that's a different ballgame if you're going to compare with Destiny 2 or WoW or League or something. But nonetheless, I think there's value in at least having some measure of calibration for what is reasonable and healthy.
12 work-days of a hobby and your partner labels it an addiction thats divorce worthy? sounds pretty terrible. I strongly suspect he/she is probably spending atleast as much time on his/her hobby.
How do you figure 450hrs is only 12 working days??? It’s already 18 actual days.
After a normal work day, after all my daily chores are done, gone to the gym and other things to take care of myself, I have maybe 2-3 hrs of free time. If we’re generous and say 3 hrs, that’s 150 days straight of spending your free time on a game and not your partner.
You can't really form any judgement without knowing more context. 450hrs over a year+? A couple months? Did the game interrupt important events or cause OP to neglect certain responsibilities?
It has even less than no merit when you consider that the guy is a content creator and the math works out to 8 hour week days with the weekend off. Basically a normal work week.
It has some merit. When Call of Duty 4 came out on XBox 360, I was completely addicted to it. At some point I noticed I had been playing the game for 2 months. I spent 2 full months out of a single year playing a game.
It was fun! Yeah, it was a lot of fun. But there are real things I could have accomplished by balancing that time with other things. I have good memories of COD4, but I still can't play piano.
And 1440 hours isn't even a lot compared to what some people are doing.
Spending 2 months learning piano would have left you as a novice piano player nobody would want to listen to in performance except for your mom. I'd argue that your CoD skills would have made you worth watching after that much time.
I mention piano because I finally did take up piano. I enjoy learning at my own pace and I impress myself with my continual improvement. I'm not imposing it on anyone else at the moment.
I was never a competitive COD player either. To this day I'm just OK at it. My k/d ratio is still < 1 (or "negative" as people oddly say)
Keep in mind they've built the series off minor iterations on the first Modern Warfare game (CoD 4) over the course of, like, 15 years. I think in the piano analogy, this would be like slightly different brands of keyboards. I wouldn't be that surprised to find I'd played around that much CoD over the course of, like, 2007-2016 and I definitely was not worth watching.
Strongly disagree. If it takes 10K hours to become an expert that person has probably spent more than 2k hours across the different COD’s. Apply the 80%/20% rule and you’re going to be at a pretty solid level of playing after investing that much time. I’d say enough to get a gig playing in a local band and more than enough to impress your mom.
It has some merit. When Call of Duty 4 came out on XBox 360, I was completely addicted to it.
Other than sporadically playing video games with my children, I haven't played regularly since I was a kid.
But that's me. I wouldn't presume to know best for anyone else - why do you think your experience is applicable to others? Is someone binge watching Netflix really better for you than playing video games? Death scrolling TikTok or Facebook? Collecting beanie babies?
I think there are a lot of things people do for varying degrees of mindless entertainment but for some reason video games are singled out as particularly bad.
At some point you have to step out of the "mind your own business" box and be a little bit judgemental. Just a little bit. Otherwise, how can we ever say we have any concern for others? You can go too far with it. Very easily! But "Meh, you do you" is just as destructive.
It depends on the nature of the relationship. The obvious one is parent-child, that parents get to have quite a lot to say about where and what their young ones spend time on, and with whom. Though part of growing up is pushing away a good deal of that influence, and then I guess for some, inviting a bunch of it back in if the relationship successfully transitions to a healthy adult-adult one.
But I don't think it really stops there— I would hope that my spouse, siblings, and close friends would feel comfortable enough speaking into my situation if they observed me falling into a pattern of behaviour that looked to be self-destructive. We need checks and balances in our lives other than the just the extreme end of having to stage an intervention when someone's bad enough that they're hitting rock bottom.
I'm not sure if you meant to reply to someone else because my main point was not "meh, you do you" but rather that there is a lot of judgement regarding video games but not in other things that are arguably even more harmful.
What bothers me about video games is that they're so accessible. Sometimes I wonder how I would spend my time if I really had many more options at my disposal. The angle has some merit, it just needs quite a few asterisks and the topic has to be evaluated carefully.
I don't doubt that millions of gamers have no such cognitive dissonance and simply enjoy their games, of course. For certain specific games, I certainly have no regrets. Some games such as SOMA were even transformative experiences.
The interesting thing for me has been the completely unintentional collapse in gaming time as I've gotten older. I was borderline addicted to games in high school, but the low barrier to in-person socializing in college, followed by relationships and rising interest in other hobbies has made video games something I have to actively choose to spend time on. Now I'm expecting a kid and even if my free time doesn't completely evaporate, I'm guessing my gaming time will.
It's weird because I still think of myself as a "gamer", but I realized I've spent almost as much time building and tinkering with my current PC as I have actually playing games on it.
The key point here is 6k hours. The game has been on Stadia for 2 and a half years.
No one is attacking hobbies or video games, the argument was: The argument of playing 6k hours of RDR2 in 2 years being too much might have some merit.
I know people that read that much but we don't go around telling bookworms they're addicts.
It's up to each person to decide where the line is for them, where a satisfying hobby becomes a destructive habit. If someone has no desire to form external relationships and they're completely content with their life, good for them for figuring things out. I'm not going to impose my arbitrary rules on them.
I love RDR2 and play it passively (a few hours a week), but I completely get how someone could get sucked in like that. I can't think of any other game that provides such an immersive world, you can get lost in its details for hours on end. Just riding your horse around with no destination in mind is a very relaxing and almost therapeutic way to pass time.
>I know people that read that much but we don't go around telling bookworms they're addicts.
I don't think you really understand how much that is. That is every single day, rain or shine, healthy or sick. If you miss one day, you have to do it for 13.4 hours the next day. You absolutely do not know someone that reads that much, not for 3 years straight.
How we spend our time is as much a personal decision as how we spend our money. People can make all sorts of judgments about what's "normal," but in the end, if the person is satisfied and content with their life and they're not causing harm, then who cares how far they are from the median.
I know a lot of people who often, like maybe several days a month, will read that much. I don't know anyone who reads every day for >2 years, >6h a day unless it's (part of) their job.
6.7h a day during two years of a pandemic. There's likely millions of people with play hours that ballooned over the past two years because there wasn't anything else they could do.
You should make noise because, unless you signed some particular contract, the code is your intellectual property and it's illegal to just take it away from you.
I bought Stadia and read the contract, I was under no illusion that I could export save files or progress to other platforms. You don't own the games you play, if you cared you'd buy from GoG.
And every time people are advised to keep a local copy. I have a bunch of stuff on an Amazon Glacier account for convenience, but I still keep an HDD in the closet
I mean I think in Red Dead Redemption 2 multiplayer there’s money to be spent? If it’s anything like GTA 5. Has he spent money on expensive cowboy hats and the like?
I like video games. They're fun. I also waste time watching YouTube videos, etc.
But the number of hours that user put into that game is quite literally 1/4 of all the hours since Stadia launched three years ago. It's nearly 3/4 of an entire year, sleeping and waking, spent on one game. That cannot be healthy or enriching.
There's a modern trend to be relentlessly supportive and approving of everything, so long as the person can claim it makes them happy. (They don't actually have to make this claim, or even actually be happy. Society will be more than happy to make it for them, and infer happiness.)
Society will say, if you want to have a family of seven kids, awesome! If you want to pull a David Hogg and not have kids, awesome! Affirmation for everyone!
I've got a pretty wide tolerance for "you do you", but objectively speaking, no. Not all lifestyles are equally valid and/or good.
It is if your hobby engages in psychological dark patterns to manipulate you to keep playing.
There's a difference when your hobby is, say, lifting weights a couple hours per week, vs being manipulated into playing a video game 6 hours per day and buying lootcrates every couple of days.
> they'll need to start a new save file on another platform
The value added from 6k hours of investment in RDR2 is at best cosmetic and trivial. The real pain here is buying the game on another platform, if that hasn't been done already. At any rate this was a cloud service. Can't trust any of them to maintain the product you want indefinitely.
> Losing his characters is the best thing that's happening for him due to wasting a very significant part of his life in video games has some merit (but could be worded differently)
This community has a real tendency towards self-righteousness that is beginning to get on my nerves. You don't know anything about this person. Even if it's a truly unhealthy habit they have, that's none of our business.
Let's be honest, you probably came here already with an axe to grind.
If you calmly read what I wrote, I mentioned the argument as a secondary observation since the main topic is Google and other "-as-a-Service" companies making victims when they change course.
>You don't know anything about this person. Even if it's a truly unhealthy habit they have, that's none of our business.
I don't know how you even expect to milk some virtue out of that statement, but I'll just say: Having awareness, observing and talking about things is everyone's business since it's a liberty we ( still ) have.
Any self-righteousness, victim blaming, etc. are things you added to my comment or misunderstood.
It's out on a public forum, it doesn't have to be our business for us to comment on it. We also don't need to know anything about him in particular to know that's a crazy amount of time to spend. He doesn't magically have more than 24 hours a day.
This is a really good point - regardless of whether you believe that losing his save file is a net good or net bad for this person (and I believe the latter), it's incredibly important to realize that this guy has no control over what happens from this point on - Google does.
We want to be in charge of making our own decisions - not Google, or Apple, or Facebook, or some other SaaS provider.
(this same argument also applies to the government, by the way)
Possibly a very modest one. I know of a couple of small streamers with few but very loyal fans. The views on their VODs or YouTube videos is a very poor indication of their economic success.
I haven't played RDR2 or RDR Online, but I doubt it's in the same league as, say, something like Candy Crush. In my opinion it's probably better for you than binge watching a Netflix show because it's less passive.
Nobody is prescribing this lifestyle for you, so feel free to return the favor and let them live theirs.
It's one thing to talk like this to somebody you know, but randomly speculating about how somebody you'll never meet might be living a lifestyle that you don't approve of is without question a less worthwhile activity than playing video games.
> The immense pressure to transform/re-frame everything as a service, aka: "You'll own nothing and be happy" leads to these situations. Now it's "just a video game", but this is starting to happen to most walks of life.
"Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better"
That's an actual quote from a member of parliament and posted by the World Economic Forum.
I’ve probably logged in thousands of hours watching, discussing, analyzing sports (not playing - that’s a separate metric)
Most older people have likely spent even more hours than this.
Yet spending 2 hours watching football, then another hour watching a bunch of talking heads discuss the game, is somehow considered “normal”.
I’m not a gamer, but what about this hobby is any different from any other passive sedentary hobby? Even reading fiction isn’t any particularly different, is it?
Games aren't a passive hobby, there's an active component of feedback. This a higher dopamine response compared to "passive" activities like watching sports or reading; arguably that's the only real difference.
They are capable of creating addictive tendencies as any other substance using the same dopamine reward would for certain individuals.
That and video games being a much younger medium and therefore a waste of time / for babies / the devil's siren call as society loves to berate them.
I have been in many a pub during a match, cheering on my team with others. So i can see you have never really considered others as having rich lives, we're all just a 1d background character to you, the star of the show...
Agency, is perhaps the better way or reason to describe games being more "addictive", the feedback loop of take action, get result, repeat. You'll be more invested in something you can shape.
I can cheer on my team, revel in the drama unfolding, but i have no say in how it goes.
A book can feed my imagination, lead me to consider new viewpoints or ideas, but i cannot change the fate of the characters.
Honestly, if more people wasted time on video games instead of sports gambling, I think the world would be a better place.
But yeah: video games are nerd stuff that you are allowed to make fun of. Gambling and sports betting is a bro thing and therefore cool, but seriously is as big a waste of time and probably a bigger waste of money.
we are trained to believe everything and anything should be on the cloud and SaaS is the right business model 'cause everything will be taken care for you then we found out that ebook collection on Amazon doesn't really belong to you. you just renting them. those song playlist that you build in Spotify that you paid every month for doesn't belong to you.
i think the Media industry finally find the ultimate "DRM". lock you down and lock you into their SaaS. you will keep paying for rights to listen to that song that you've paid more than enough and that song still doesn't belong to you.
> The immense pressure to transform/re-frame everything as a service, aka: "You'll own nothing and be happy" leads to these situations. Now it's "just a video game", but this is starting to happen to most walks of life.
Indeed. It is everything-as-a-service subscription, rent-seeking, griftopia created by our tech overloads which "you will own nothing and you'll be an extremely happy user" and all your digital games and save games gone if the service shuts down, bans you or terminates your access.
I totally feel this in non-gaming spaces too— like, how much effort do I really want to put into "starring" my favourite shows on Netflix to help them recommend me stuff? Is it worth the bother of trying to do anything more than the bare minimum as far as organizing my Spotify tunes into manually-curated playlists? Adding annotations to pictures on Google Photos or Facebook?
When you don't own anything and it could all disappear in the blink of an eye, it's hard to feel like it's super worthwhile investing.
Bad take. If he spent 6k hours whittling or playing chess or reading would it be better? Hobbies are hobbies. Some seem silly to others but the person was clearly enjoying the game.
> Although the angle of: Losing his characters is the best thing that's happening for him due to wasting a very significant part of his life in video games has some merit (but could be worded differently)
IMHO, that's taking it too far. Anyone who has spent that much time on a video game is probably not going to change their habit because they lost a character.
I do my hobbies because if I dont I'll fill the time by smoking cigarettes which I am really trying hard not to do. I specifically engage in pointless pastimes because they have better health outcomes than spending an equivalent amount of time smoking tobacco on the porch.
I think social gaming can have a lot of personal value (especially with the last 3 years being pandemic years). But RDO arguably is showing signs of a sunsetting service, so maybe it's best that this painful loss happen sooner than a few years later.
Delicious irony, seeing as you are yelling your comment into the digital void. Maybe some AI will one day use it in a training set on the way to sentience and your words here will have some value? Otherwise I wouldn’t cast stones.
why you shouldn't depend on these platforms for anything of value
I disagree with this. I found it unmanageable to do my own backups without the cloud and remember passwords.
I trust my bank because the the government has laws to protect me.
We have zero laws for cloud platforms. In the event of a shutdown or request to transfer off to another cloud, laws should be in place where these companies must comply. We are in the cave man era of cloud platforms on a legal level.
For everyone having opinions about how many hours this person has spent playing RDR2, you should probably note that he's an RDR2 Youtube and Twitch content creator/streamer. So at face value, it has been his job for the last 2.5 years.
Yeah that blunts my immediate reaction of "This is blessing in disguise", that said I'm really hard pressed to understand how this person doing this for a job thought Google's streaming service would be the best choice.. at a certain point dedicated hardware is a very sensible business purchase.
Stadia had built-in support for streaming directly to Youtube. Very easy, completely integrated and heavily advertised.
Setting up your own hardware streaming build in 2019 was more difficult and expensive.
So this user "bought" (or accepted) a product from Google that promised to make everything easy for them and, until now, it was fulfilling that promise.
Then start a new game on a different system and speed run. If he is really good at the game he will likely get more views than resting on his laurels with whatever groove he has settled in to. That said having never heard of or watched him before and not knowing his schtick...
It probably won't happen. But FWIW... I had one of the early Nintendo battery-backed carts break on me once. Sent it in for repair. About a month later got a new copy of the cart and a note that apologized for the delay, because their technology allowed them to scan my save file but not to upload it back into the cart. So they'd had a Game Counselor play the game back to where my character was, which delayed the repair.
Neither Rockstar nor Google likely have the scale to fix this issue for everyone, but that kind of customer service is how you get customers for life.
(To be clear, 6k hours is a lot of time and I don't mean to imply it'll be feasible to solve this user's problem that way. But if they can spend a fraction of that time doing even a one-off import into another data format, wouldn't that be cool.)
I had several experiences with Nintendo customer service from the NES timeframe through the GameCube timeframe and every single one was amazing, legendary even.
I don't know if they're still like that, but, the past, apparent "severity" of their mandate to please customers who had issues leads me to find this story plausible.
I hadn't even considered this as a consequence of Stadia shutting down. I naively thought, "Well, everyone is getting refunded for everything they spent, so it's fine." Clearly I was wrong. Of course there are folks that have actual game saves that they're heavily invested in on the platform that aren't easily portable.
I feel sorry for this person and hope that Google and its partners like Rockstar work together to create solutions to ensure that people's saves and earned content like game unlocks and achievements aren't lost. I hope that any cloud streaming service that still exists learns from this and ensures that player's data is more portable so in the event that they must shut down, this same problem doesn't crop up again.
I think Google's biggest flaw in this regard is their own denial of the pattern of shutting things down. If they just acknowledge that's how things go, they can prepare better off-ramps for people who adopted their product. Doing this to your users is a slap in the face because it shows no gratitude for the fact that those people took a chance on your product. They believed in it, and it's not their fault your project failed. Why should they suffer?
But because of Google's hubris, they seem to never admit that failure is an option. Of course they shouldn't say it publicly, but they should have much better internal plans in place for euthanizing products humanely. Failure to do so repeatedly, on a scale like this, reeks of organizational dysfunction, and the absence a moral compass.
I was not a Stadia user, but events like this reinforce my motivation to drop all the Google products I possibly can before they drop me.
The average Googler hated how many good products were killed. Many want to continue/improve many of the (countless) products that were sunset. I'm sure memegen is on fire as we speak and how Google should be and do better.
Sadly, that's not how it works in a corporate. At least not at Google.
If your boss moves you off the project and hands you new work, that's how it is. You need to spend ~8hrs/day on your next project. Doesn't leave you with any time to work on that project you know is being sunset, and definitely won't help with your Perf and yearly bonus.
Many products have like 2-3 people keeping the lights on for months before eventually the plug is pulled. This rarely happens overnight -- the teams have been moved/offboarded months ago, working on other higher priority stuff.
I don't know how it was for Stadia though -- but I assume it was the same.
> I was not a Stadia user, but events like this reinforce my motivation to drop all the Google products I possibly can before they drop me.
I currently do AWS infra. This is job security to me, because every time Google shutters another product, a whole cohort of companies chooses AWS over GCP because we all know Google will pull the plug on GCP any day now.
Yes. I am a Technical Advisor for early startups, and I will invariably recommend AWS over Google Cloud to people exactly because of this. I would not trust Google with any small piece of my company. I don't doubt that they CAN do things right, but I am sure they WONT, given their implicit monopoly status. Their arrogant "don't give a shit" attitude about users of their different platforms is amazing.
One just have to see how they treat their actual customers of their Ads platform, and think, if that's how they treat their customers, what can non-customer "lusers" of the other subsidized platforms (including GCS which is being subsidized at this point) expect.
Back in the day of cordless phones and landlines, I had a phone with a GOOG411 button, which was great until one day Google shut that service down. I’ve never trusted them since
Honestly they have the capital to take a position where they publicly state they aren't investing in the product anymore, they'll happily refund people money and work with studios to help users move to other platforms but they'll also keep the lights on for whomever wants to keep using it, unsupported.
Why they completely kill and bury entire products very quickly is sort of bizarre for a company their size.
It’s not healthy to have too many zombie products and staff around your company. Especially at the rate that Google introduces products and then shuts them down, at this point they would have tons staff working on sunsetted products. Besides how incredibly expensive that is, it’s bad for morale.
The question is just how to shut things down in a good way. Honestly it seems like Google has done better than they usually do with this one (refunding everything), but it’s never possible to make everyone happy who depended on your service.
I transitioned from a Gmail account that is more than 10 years old that I previously used for everything. It was much less of a pain than I expected.
I set up a new inbox with Fastmail on my own domain and set the Gmail to forward everything to the new address. Then I started updating things whenever I received a forwarded message. Over couple of months everything important got gradually sorted out and I cleaned up the rest based on my password manager.
Now I only keep the Gmail around because of the Google Play purchases tied to it plus the possibility that some old colleague or acquaintance may have the old address saved. But if Google shuts it down it isn't a big loss.
Overall, the benefit of more control definitely outweighs the hassle of switching. I would recommend it.
Using your own domain name for your emails is probably the most important thing you can do, and everyone should do it. I settled on iCloud+ because I already pay $.99 a month to get more storage. For this price I get support for custom domain names and wildcard fallbacks. It's also configurable natively in the iPhone settings.
At this price it's a pretty good deal + I know I can switch provider anytime.
I highly recommend Fastmail. Self hosting is a dream but spam filter monopolies are a nightmare. Opting out of being the product is a good compromise. I pay for email.
I tried my friend's Stadia. One time he come over connected his controller to my Chromecast and it worked amazingly. I was sold.
The only reason I didn't buy my own, because I have to pay full price for every game and I was afraid what would happen if they shut down the system. If they would have said something like: If you purchase a game from us you will be able to play it for 5 years if not we pay your money back. They did the same in the end, but loosed out a lot of people like me.
It's not just the save file in games like this, it's also all of the virtual currencies users paid real world money for. If someone has played 6k hours on RDR2 they likely bought a LOT of in-game currency and other in-game items. A huge potential for monetary and time loss.
I saw mention that you could get your save games out via Google Takeout, but I don't know if that's verified or if it would even be in a format that's usable to someone.
Unfortunately you can't, because Red Dead (((Online))) locks your account on the platform you play, his account on Stadia will simply be erased into oblivion.
>people's saves and earned content like game unlocks and achievements aren't lost.
What does that even mean though? A piece of paper or digital equivalent that lists your in-game achievements? That's worth... a piece of paper or digital equivalent. I mostly don't even get the equivalent for lots of things I spent a lot of time on in real life. I guess I have a diploma somewhere though I don't actually know. (That is at least somewhat verifiable without the original piece of paper.)
I certainly don't expect "achievements" like that to be transferrable other than in a generalized life experiences sort of way.
I remember when I spent a couple hundred dollars buying albums on Google Music only to have the service "migrated" to YouTube music. Except now my music is only available with ads whereas before it was ad free. That's not what I paid for.
After that, it became clear to me Google could not be trusted. Any service I use with them today, I do so with the expectation of them pulling the rug at any time.
5907 hours spent playing RDR2? Assuming he spent 12 hours a day playing that's 492 days spent doing nothing but playing RDR2 (the 246 days quoted in the article assumes he didn't sleep, eat, go to the loo, shower, etc.). He's literally spent 33% of his waking life in the ~4 years since release doing nothing but playing RDR2 or RDR Online? That seems... perhaps unhealthy, certainly unbalanced - it's definitely a lot of time invested in one game which, given the profusion of other excellent games available, seems maybe too limited? Each to their own, I guess.
It's 4 hours a day for 4 years. That could breakdown to a couple of hours a night and full days on weekends. Millions of people spend just as much time watching TV, or reading, or playing Call of Duty. That's nothing particularly unusual or special about that amount of time.
Back in the early days of World of Warcraft people would have seen 4 hours a night as light, casual gaming. :)
I see alot of people in my personal circle criticize gaming, but do the same watching TV/movies, reading books, etc.
One might think, well books are educational. You learn something from them. There's so many bestselling books out there written by so called "experts" that turn out to be totally wrong or mislead by giving a layman's explanation of research post book release, and 10-20 years later the same nonsense is being passed on from one generation to the next.
The difference with gaming is the saturation threshold. Some people are able to binge shows of course but no show has the 'just one more moment' effect displayed quite as powerfully as a well-designed game. Eventually even a show with 10 seasons ends but RDR2/Factorio/Civ is forever.
There's a very big difference between gaming for 4 hours a day and spending the same amount of time in a single game. Watching ALL episodes of Friends takes 88 hours, you'd certainly call a person crazy if they watched Friends +60 times in a 4 year period.
And let's not pretend like WoW is normal or particularly well accepted.
He was over 5k nine months ago according to one of his streams, so that would make it ~6.4h.
His videos don't have nearly high enough view counts for this to be his main or even meaningful income source. Also, a big part of his shtick seemed to be that he was playing on Stadia.
> He's literally spent 33% of his waking life in the ~4 years since release doing nothing but playing RDR2 or RDR Online? That seems... perhaps unhealthy, certainly unbalanced
A lot of tech people have a blind spot for excessive video game addiction that goes beyond having some fun with your friends on nights and weekends. The mainstream focus is all about social media apps, but at least among tech people I believe video game addiction is a serious problem for a significant number of people.
I've known several people who lost their social lives almost completely to WoW, EVE Online, competitive multi-player games, or just burying themselves in the 1000 on-sale or free games they've collected in their Steam accounts. Losing entire years to video games during the formative stages of young adulthood can be devastating for social development.
I think 6K hours is excessive, but before anyone casts stones, they should count up how many hours they've spent glued to their smartphones. If we had to pick one, phone addiction is probably a more widespread problem to tackle than video games.
Is it ok to spend the same time on motorcycles, paragliding, mountaineering, snowboarding, and so on? There are divorces because of motorcycles and other addictive passions. These activities are much riskier and more expensive.
I know there have been gamers like this for years but in this case 2 of the 4 years were during a mandatory isolate at home public health crisis. It’s possible this was actually a positive escape to help cope.
Personally I’m not attached to digital ephemera. I’ve already lost more save games and files of one type of content over another to be used to it. I’d call the clingy-ness the real issue. Others have to put in a bunch of work to manage this persons figurative video game identity?
This is certainly true. Though public health analysis only shows correlations, not causations, between video game playing and decreased alcohol and drug use. And in my life, whenever I knew men whose girlfriends would relentlessly harp on their video game playing, it gets substituted by alcohol.
In medicine it is called video game fixation. I’m concerned though that it is not open as a possibility that what they are calling a disease is closer to a medicine than certainly alcohol, tobacco or drug use are. Closer to how coffee is used for tiredness, maybe, for a depressed 15-25yo male, than to any of those things. That said this guy is spending 33% of his life, and video game fixation can also look like 90%, which is certainly pathological.
Anyone with a full-time job has spent about 8000 hours on that singular activity in the same timeframe. I'm not sure that tells us that what this guy is doing is healthy, but it does raise the question... is working the way we do healthy either?
8k hours on a job should be leading to portable artifacts that are difficult to take away:
Something like 120K of income (probably closer to $200k), and a progression of skill development. Also could have intangibles like a feeling of contribution, socialization, purpose.
Yes, exceptions exist. But many could make their job have these kinds of outcomes if they choose to do so
The notion of work itself is strange. If you are autonomous in what you do, feel your mastery increasing as you go along, see your actions have an effect, and are well rewarded for it in terms of material wealth and social approval, few other things in life are going to compare. If you are missing most of these characteristics, it will daily torture.
Hahahahaha. Hell no. Most today's overwork is for escaping financial insecurity, anxiety, due to obsessive-compulsive tendencies, making up for one's lack of self-worth or a mix of all of those...
It's certainly not healthy but I don't see the system changing until most of our lifetimes have already passed, making the question academic. Or perhaps we are not bold enough or ready for sacrifice in our commitment to finding alternatives.
In some small defense, you could definitely go to the bathroom, shower, and eat while the game was active.
I wouldn't be surprised if that were some of those hours. Hours where the game is active, but he's not actively playing.
Assuming he plays every day. And assuming he doesn't take any vacations in this time (mainly because I don't want to deal with the math). With the game being on for 4 hours on days when he has work and 12 hours on days he doesn't. That's 44 hours a week he could be playing. And it would take him about 2 and half years to log that many hours.
Then I got even more curious. There have been 1046 days since the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 on the Stadia. He played about 5 hours 40 minutes a day every single day.
Someone else pointed out that he streams it, so it's akin to a job.
I wouldn't pass judgement on someone like this without more information. I've met disabled people who don't have a whole lot to do and pour themselves into a universe like this, I can totally understand that situation... and there are all types of different examples like this. You can't always assume the person on the other end of the line is just like you.
People with uncontrolled obsessive behaviors aren't typically "cured" by losing the thing they obsessed over. Sometimes it's the opposite, and they become suicidal.
Do you have a smartphone? The average person checks their phone about 300 times a day and spends 50 days a year scrolling on them. App culture and algorithms designed to addict people have taken over public consciousness and most are not self aware of it.
Most are addicted to being constantly reachable, constantly distracted with the latest social media notifications and most shrug it off because seemingly everyone else has the same addiction.
When you stop using surveillance capitalism services, or a smartphone entirely, it becomes easy to see these addictions in others and it looks gross seeing families at restaurants all staring at their phones in a circle.
At least console video games do not follow you around in your pocket. You generally spend at least time fully walking away from game consoles, but almost no one leaves home without their social media notification machines.
I believe some buy games to farm trading cards and artificially increase their playtime. How skewed this data is only Valve knows as they have capabilities to identify farmers but don't do much.
I'm honestly very surprised Rockstar doesn't provide a way to migrate your story/online character between platforms. At least when I upgraded Xbox versions of GTAV, there was a process to save to Rockstar's servers and then re-load from them, and it worked like a charm. Migrating consoles/platforms is such a common thing to do -- so this is really a Rockstar problem, not a Google one.
(I mean purely financially it seems like a no-brainer -- it incentivizes people to buy a new copy of the game, and keep playing to keep those microtransactions rolling in...)
On the other hand, if this was a professional gamer, I'm truly confused as to why they sunk 6K hours into the Stadia version? Seems like they'd want to run it locally on an Xbox/PS/PC simply for performance -- and the guarantee that it couldn't be shut down. I always thought Stadia was meant for more casual gamers, and everybody knew Stadia always had the risk it might be shut down, so I really do wonder what this gamer was thinking...?
Rockstar apparently removed cross-platform save migrations due to people cheating on PC and selling accounts for consoles.
> Seems like they'd want to run it locally on an Xbox/PS/PC simply for performance
Having played RDR2 extensively on Stadia, i assure you there were no performance issues and the visuals were good (not the same as a 4090 RTX gaming PC of course, but still good).
I'll just chime in to say that logged hours don't always translate to hours spent playing.
I'll often launch a video game, play for 20 minutes, and then alt-tab into my browser and get back to work, with the game paused in the background. At this point, Steam thinks that I've spent 500 hours playing a game, where the actual value is closer to 40. The same effect might be in play here.
Not really, I've had Control paused for ~20-30 minutes sometimes as I did something in another window. I think it was even on a free account (because I kept thinking about the 1-hour limit).
This is a risk of and why do you not pour your life into someone else's project. (without a commensurate return that you can own fully)
He chose (knowingly or unknowingly) to be meat for a giant machine. Now he wonders why he got ground up and spit out.
It's one thing to play a video game and end up grateful for having enjoyed and spent the time on a hobby, and walk away with good memories. It's another thing to end up begging/pleading to a soulless machine for their mercy and consideration.
Sucks to see this guy being criticized so much here. If he just really likes the game, what's wrong with that? Why does it have to be justified as "his work" for it to pass as a barely acceptable thing.
I would've expected some empathy for the guy in here of all places. I'd dare to think that most people here spends most of their time in front of a screen anyway, and have done so for years. Whether you're coding or playing a game makes literally no difference to your body and your health. Yet you still have the nerve to pick on a guy who is literally doing no harm to anyone, pathetic.
An excellent object lesson on why you never, ever rely on Google. We're all just pawns in their ongoing quest to create and destroy entire online systems, seemingly at random.
I'm assuming this guy's hours were mostly on Red Dead Online. I know that RDO doesn't have crossplay between PC and consoles. But did RDO also not have crossplay between PC (Steam, Epic, R*) and Stadia? Stadia players were on their own little instance?
But it's still a rhetorical question: like, I'm surprised the infrastructure between Stadia and regular PC was so different that Stadia was effectively its own console. I assumed it was just a somewhat thicker version of something like Nvidia's GeForce, which let you (for the most part) access your own Steam library.
> I'm surprised the infrastructure between Stadia and regular PC was so different that Stadia was effectively its own console. I assumed it was just a somewhat thicker version of something like Nvidia's GeForce,
And Nvidia is being stifled by that. Their UX is bad and leaky (you see Windows components and errors, and you have to login into launchers, with MFA, every time when starting a new session), and they probably pay a fortune for Microsoft licenses. Meanwhile Google had full control of the stack and could do whatever they wanted with it, including optimise it to hell for latency.
An issue that Stadia had with cross play is that controller and KB/M were both very common ways to play. Controller players would not want to play against PC users with keyboards. And Keyboard users would have an unfair advantage against console players with controllers. I think one game changed which you were matchmaked against depending on which input method you were using.
Without even addressing what it was this guy actually did with his six thousand hours, after investing only six hundred hours of your time in any productive pursuit you'll definitely be showing real results, let alone six thousand. 600 hours invested in learning a language, or improving your physical fitness, or learning an instrument is a serious positive investment in yourself. It's common to hear people wishing they could play piano, or speak French, or many other things. An hour a day is all it takes to do something awesome with your life.
Can someone explain how you play rdr2 for 6k hours? what exactly is he losing in game when stadia shuts down? so if he had played rdr2 on his pc, then stadia shutdown wouldn't affect him at all right?
RDR2 has an online component just like GTA online. In this online mode you play your character as long as you like, building up assets and stats as you complete missions/raids/races etc. This game mode is open ended, so if you spend enough time you can build up an enormous amount of in game assets and currency.
Rockstar locks multiplayer to specific platforms, so if you buy a game on xbox and level up your character there, you can never use that same character on any other platform. In this way you are correct, if he had played on PC all this time then his game save would be in the PC platform cloud not the Stadia cloud.
The guy is a youtube/twitch streamer, so to him loosing this character probably feels like loosing his job.
If this was any other game company I could see it happening but this is Rockstar who would probably see this and choose not to do it not because they can't but because they don't want to.
How do you spend that many hours on a game? It boggles my mind. I spent a couple hundred hours on DOTA2 in one year and look back at that year as being a year fruitlessly spent playing DOTA2.
So for that many hours Google must have spent more than he did at the game right? How does a business model like this ever become profitable when it is not subscription or usage based?
But there exist business models that operate like this. Usage usually follows a Pareto distribution. At one end, you spend almost nothing on usage, on the other end you spend more than you charged on usage. Assuming your long tail is long enough, and your power users few enough, you take a loss on one end of the Pareto and make your money on the other.
Where these models fail is when you can convert a resource fairly directly into value I.E. compute. Once your customers realize they can put $10 in and get $15 back out, you have a problem.
This problem is already leaking into the world of physical consoles. Afaik the only (legal) way to backup your savegame data on a Nintendo Switch is to transfer it directly to another Switch (and deleting it from the first) or get an online account (which was only available 1,5 years after the Switch launched). No saves can be stored on cartridges or the SD card. So if your Switch goes broken for some reason and you didn't want to pay for online backups every month your out of luck.
I haven't played RDR online, but I'm pretty surprised. I would have assumed it used your Rockstar account, not your Stadia account, and that you could use that same account on any platform.
On the other hand, this is what you have to accept as a possible outcome when you invest yourself in someone else's service. Stadia's existence has been shaky from day 1, so it's not like he couldn't have seen this coming.
> Because we're so out of our minds with desperation, we don't know any better. All we know is fake fodder and buying shit. That's how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves, is buying shit. What, I have a dream? The peak of our dreams is a new app for our Dopple, it doesn't exist! It's not even there! We buy shit that's not even there.
Computer games is a dopamine that you get, but did not earn in the real life.
I played computer games since 1992, if I spent all this time on writing code, it would be better.
But when you are stressed out or in pain, it is better to play computer games, rather look at alcohol.
P.S. When Witcher 4, Stalker 2, or Fallout 5 will be released I will play again :)
P.P.S. This story is a great example of why NFTs in the game industry has some value.
In this case the fault lies somewhat with Rockstar. When you decide to move from playing GTA V on console to PC for example, you still lose your online progress with no option to transfer after Rockstar shut down transfers in 2016.
Man that sucks. Just to point something out, the nvidia solution uses your steam account and syncs save files with steam for supported games just like it does when you install it locally.
Whoa sounds like a classmate of mine.
He loved loved loved Stadia.
It was absolutely perfect for a university campus.
You could get some gaming on the go in between classes pretty easily.
My wife is on Google Fi. She got a good deal on a phone that she liked, so we went with it. But I need to figure out how to end the contract gracefully any transfer to another carrier.
A lot of critiques here of how this individual chooses to spend his free time by people who choose to spend _their_ free time looking down on others on a web forum.
I imagine some fat cat google exec smoking a cigar and laughing maniacly at the article. Similarly an exec Rockstar shrugs and moves to the next tweet.
They deserve it for supporting shit like Stadia. It's one rare case where smug, annoying assholes who are cheerleading the destruction of personal computing (and, if you pay attention, the slow abolition of private property) are facing some negative consequences.
I used to think that politely warning people about obvious consequences of their bad decisions it a reasonable way to go. That if you are eloquent enough and logical enough they will see the dangers. ("If you use this service right now, Google will control your games in the future.") That was a naive and stupid view. Most people have no imagination whatsoever. They are physically incapable of imagining a shitty situation directly caused by their own decisions and actions. They need a real-life example. Well, this is it.
What are the odds he did this deliberately for exposure, expecting Stadia to be cancelled? It's hard to imagine somebody doing it otherwise, particularly considering he's a 'semi-pro' gamer trying to make a name for himself with online video content. Does he really not have a gaming PC of his own? And if he does, why was he using Stadia instead?
Wasn't one of the big features of Stadia that you could essentially play it on any device anywhere as long as you had a fast internet connection?
Perhaps he was dedicated, but put a lot of time in while not at his home setup - playing on the train, long uber rides, hotels, etc...? Just speculating....
You think he played a game for 6000 hours because he thought the service he played on would be canceled and he would have one day of exposure someday? That seems pretty unlikely.
The immense pressure to transform/re-frame everything as a service, aka: "You'll own nothing and be happy" leads to these situations. Now it's "just a video game", but this is starting to happen to most walks of life.