Red Dead Redemption 2 fan with 6k hours on Stadia begs for character transfer
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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.
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.
[I've spent 450 hours in Factorio, but stopped soon after my partner nick named it Divorcio.]
This "if it isn't productive it isn't worthwhile" attitude is toxic.
Not to mention the game in question has at most what... 100 hours of content ? it's not comparable in any way
The old idea that “nobody on their deathbed wished they spent more time at work” can easily apply to your side hustle.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I would ask: are you happy? If you are, then you are doing it right. If you aren't, then do something 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.
>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.
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.
It's Factorio, so, yes.
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.
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.
Very different from someone that plays video games a few hours every day
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.
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.
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.
Furthermore, controlling the full platform has enormous advantages in terms of scalability, low-latency streaming and control.
The hubris to go ahead with something like this....
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.
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")
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)
Wild.
When there are significant negative consequences.
Why should something that unstresses, revitalizes and inspires you should be an addition.
With that logic, food is an addiction. Sleep. Rest. Even poetry and art.
https://howlongtobeat.com/game/27100
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".
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.
The lifestyle changes I mentioned have displaced gaming in my dopamine system. I also never want to get sucked in again. That is my main defence.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33036297
> 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.
Yay steam .... Installing...
Alt d Type steam Click or hit enter on app from dmenu.
Done.
Hardly something one figures out or learns to do, esp if they already use Linux.
"Oh, Linuxville! I love that place, it has a great casino."
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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
* ...
Why do you think there is so much investment into the metaverse?
When it negatively affects your life outside of that activity.
We're also talking about someone who is apparently a steamer or YouTuber.
When you are doing something society thinks is uncool.
If someone spent that amount of time training to say run a marathon, nobody would blink an eye. Probably they would get praise for being dedicated.
Reminds me of the poor vs rich double standard meme.
Poor guy getting drunk == "a bum"; rich guy getting drunk == "just having fun".
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.
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.
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us" - Gandalf (J.R.R. Tolkien)
would you say i'm an addict?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dead_Online#Additional_con...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
Six thousand hours in a video game is not good.
The real question is: Is that person happy/content/comfortable. That's what matters, however they get there.
Why is living with an aim of happiness and contentment unhealthy?
As long as a person doesn't hurt others with how they spend their time, who are we to judge?
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.
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)
Too easy now to go 'poor victim has no control'
There was a strong chances of this happening and many were heralding the warnings.
He’s a streamer. He makes a living from playing that game. What’s your job? Let’s compare total value add.
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.
boy are you in for a shock.... Governments has laws to protect the bank...
I dont trust any bank, that is why I have mutiple accounts at several credit unions, and other institutions
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
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.
"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.
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.
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 was wondering if how many people buy into the vision "Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better". https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...
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.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
But have never made anything, just played with the menus they put there for you.
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 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 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.
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.
Why they completely kill and bury entire products very quickly is sort of bizarre for a company their size.
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.
Ditto. Im literally considering phasing my personal gmail out to a domain that I own...
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.
At this price it's a pretty good deal + I know I can switch provider anytime.
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 get the feeling that many were blindsided with the abruptness.
the deprecation schedule however... different story
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google is an ad company. Nothing more. Nothing less. They aren't very good at that one either, they just have a monopoly.
Basically the difference between living to work, and working to live, and how we should be mindful of balancing it all
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
Most streamers make very little, including likely this person.
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...
Back in the early days of World of Warcraft people would have seen 4 hours a night as light, casual gaming. :)
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.
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.
And let's not pretend like WoW is normal or particularly well accepted.
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.
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.
I really would like to see the game logs.
Also if you look at steam reviews they say the number of hours played. Some people have 10k+ for some games.
In a positivist view, those are hours not trying new games.
To reframe what other have already said, it is just as bad for the game industry as it is from a social perspective that people spend time this way.
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 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.
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.
This is his job- by definition, he is a professional at RDR2. He gets paid for it.
Just how many hours have you spent in VSCode or VStudio? Shall we criticize other professions and how long you're in there?
(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...?
> 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 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.
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.
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.
edit: to answer my own question: No https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/hrsypo/does_read_de...
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.
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.
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.
6000 hours / 4 years is about four hours a day.
That's dedication. But man, I feel embarrassed to admit I have 1200 hours in CS:GO. I can't pretend that was a good investment.
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.
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.
-- The Black Mirror
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.
I could have been reading, or running.
6k hours devoted to a hobby is not that much for an adult.
So we shouldn't trust them. I know remember the pitch meeting Google gave to a studio I worked at. Sleazy as hell.
Well, I sympathise with the player's predicament, but I have to snarkily point out the irony here.
If he played every day, it would be about 5 hours a day.
Assuming he took 2 days off a week:
152 weeks since release
152 * (5 days per week) = 760 days
24 * 760 = 18240 hours
6000 / 18240 = ~0.33
.33 * 24 = ~8 hours every day.
That's not a game, that's a job.
The guys twitter profile says "YouTube/TikTok Creator for #RedDeadOnline on Stadia.". So, it's a job.
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.
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....
If he just played around with stadia and just kept playing, I think it's easy to accept this as normal.
I was very close to start playing cyberpunk on stadia due to GPU issues. I wouldn't have switched in the middle just to save a few bucks per month