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.

As someone who ran a raiding group for over 4 years in WoW, it's stimulating in a whole host of ways, including making real friends.

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.

Was Proton viable back when Stadia was built?

Oof. Sounds like this poor fellow hitched his stagecoach to the wrong hoss.

No, there is very much an online multiplayer side to the game

Clearly you haven't read the article. It specifically mentions they don't play story mode (single player).

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.