After rescuing his 6,000-hour character, Stadia's biggest Red Dead Online fan has already started a new account on PS5

ItsColourTV, the Red Dead Redemption 2 fan who begged Rockstar for a way to transfer his 6,000-hour Red Dead Online character off Google Stadia before its pending shutdown, is back from the brink. 

Rockstar recently reached out to him with a lifeline. The studio announced that character progress including RDO$, gold bars, XP and Role XP, and Role Tokens can be transferred from Stadia to another account on PC, Xbox One, or PS4 (with forward compatibility on new-gen consoles). 

It isn't a perfect fix. A non-trivial amount of unlocks including exclusive items will still be lost. But it's a thousand times better than losing 6,000 hours of progress to the black hole of the cloud. And with that in mind, Colour's already made a new account to prepare.

"I have started a new character on PS5," Colour tells GamesRadar. He's also considering Xbox since "that's where most of my friends from Stadia RDO are moving to." But he's understandably steering clear of PC "due to the hackers and modmenu users."

"I am still in touch with many of my friends from the groups I played with on RDO Stadia," he says. "Many of my community members are also players on Stadia." 

"Stadia's convenience and technology was what made me curious to try it," he says, explaining how he got into the cloud streaming platform. "My dad recommended it to me and we both use a lot of other Google products. When I tried it, I was impressed that I could play Red Dead Redemption 2 from any device including my phone. Works great at my university campus in between classes. At the time of Stadia's launch, I already had consoles and a gaming PC so for me it was mainly the convenience." 

"I reached out to [Rockstar's] support team when the Stadia announcement came out," he explains. "Just through the regular customer support channels whenever players experience issues. I didn't really get anywhere with that. No progress was made until Rockstar reached out to me directly via Twitter. There wasn't too much back and forth. They let me know about the possibility of transferring which I had a few questions about. Then they gave me the response that I screenshotted and tweeted." 

I think the question on everyone's mind throughout this saga was simple: how do you put 6,000 hours into Red Dead Online? I mean, it's not unheard of. People have put far more time into many other games and even smaller games, sure, but Red Dead Online isn't exactly a Final Fantasy 14-sized experience. What do you do for 6,000 hours? 

"I wouldn't have this many hours on the game if it weren't for the people that I met on there," Colour says. "I made many friends and the community is really nice. There's only so much you can do with the lack of content in Red Dead Online. The game was a way for me to hang out with my friends especially during the pandemic and quarantine season in 2020.

"Most of the time my friends and I just ran Trader deliveries. But again, it was just a way for us to all be in a posse together and hang out while we made some cash in-game." 

Colour's experience is probably familiar to many longtime Red Dead Online players. The game's notorious lack of new content prompted the community to hold a funeral for the game earlier this year – one that Colour says he didn't attend simply because he was busy and the funeral scene was less active on Stadia – but the social aspect has been enough to pick up the slack for many players. Even so, Colour, like many Red Dead fans, was disheartened to see Rockstar formally abandon the game mode. 

"Regarding the state of the game, it was heartbreaking to see Rockstar announce that they will be shifting resources to focus on the development of GTA 6," Colour adds. "I share the same views as many in the RDO community, that the game has a lot of potential and I hope it doesn't go to waste." 

Stadia-exclusive Outcasters wasn't so lucky; it's going down with Google's ship next year.