Red Dead Online's biggest superfan may lose 6,000 hours of progress on Stadia
You can refund the money, sure, but how do you refund 250 days?
Some developers working on projects for Google's soon-to-be shut down Stadia cloud gaming platform have had the rug pulled out from under them. Plenty of gamers are losing save progress and a go-to platform. Arguably no one has been more punked than YouTuber and TikTok creator Colour, who, as reported by GamesRadar, has over 6,000 hours on the Stadia version of Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption Online 2. All that rootin' tootin' cowboy fun is about to be lost to time, like tears in rain.
6,000 hours is an utterly staggering amount of time to spend on anything. This isn't your usual "spent too much time on a game," this is 250 days. I've been an avid barbell and kettlebell lifter for five years, reaching a point I'd comfortably call "intermediate to advanced." Back of the napkin math puts me at 1,500-2,000 hours actively pursuing one of my main hobbies in that time.
Further manic, frenzied calculations lead me to conclude that 6,000 hours of RDR Online 2 since its Stadia release in November 2018 has Colour averaging over four hours a day. If you allow for a weekend, it's closer to six hours. Granted, Colour does do a lot of content creation for RDR Online 2, being the "RDR Online 2 on Stadia person" is kind of their thing, but I still find this to be an utterly maddening amount of gameplay! This is my Pepe Sylvia.
Forget the logistics of it all though, Colour's time investment in Red Dead Online is in grave danger of becoming one of those Libraries of Alexandria that's constantly burned down on the internet every day. It doesn't have to be this way.
No you don't understand how seriously pissed off I am pic.twitter.com/UZ157WLmruSeptember 29, 2022
There are methods to transfer single player progress from RDR2 on Stadia to PC, just not the multiplayer transfer Colour requires. Other developers with Stadia ports like IO Interactive and Bungie are actively working on methods to allow players to transfer their data to another platform.
Colour, for their part, is hoping for a "one-time character transfer" to save their progress from the jaws of oblivion. We've reached out to Rockstar for comment, and will update this story if we hear back.
I may not be able to wrap my head around Colour's investment of time and psyche into Read Dead Redemption Online 2 on Stadia, but I can admire the devotion. I hope Rockstar is able to help them before the winds of fate blow Colour's progress away like some digital sand mandala.