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.

*looks nervously at time spent on HN*

Stadia launched in November 2019, so not even 3 years ago.

That's 1,064 days ago, so it's 5.5 hours a day instead of 4. That still sounds pretty reasonable to me.

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.