dev1ce talks about stress and infidelity during NiP stint

On 23 April 2021, Ninjas in Pyjamas announced the transfer of Nicolai "dev1ce" Reedtz. The move came out of nowhere and shocked the entire scene. It made sense for device personally. The player had been living in Sweden since 2018 and commuting to Copenhagen to play with Astralis. While not a major issue in the constant travel-filled LAN era, the issues of living in a different country must have exacerbated in the constant boot camp-filled online era. Yet the move was perplexing professionally, as he was breaking up the greatest lineup ever to play and moving to a team that was only a contender because his name was now attached to it. So to say that the move carried a lot of pressure would be an understatement.

Ever since dev1ce went on a mental health break at the end of 2021 and then returned to Astralis in 2022, there has been widespread speculation about what caused the issues and the subsequent return. The player has largely maintained a silence on the topic, but now 6 months after his return, dev1ce has finally talked about the whole situation in a recent interview on YouTube.

The player talked about the stress-related illnesses that have plagued him throughout his career and how they worsened during the NiP period due to his isolation in Sweden after his breakup.

I've always had stress problems and ever since I started, it's always been a lot with my stomach. I think I had a year and a half or two years where I just threw up every other day because of stress. It's just the pressure, the travel days and that you never relax. And then at the end of NIP, I ended up being alone in Sweden without any friends and no girlfriend or anything. And then I just started getting worse and worse with stress and I didn't know what it was, it just kept going.

The issues grew to such a point that the player was unsure if he even wanted to return to the game and to Astralis.

I wasn't even sure if I wanted to go back to CS or Astralis for that matter. For me it was about the fact that I really don't want to have that crap and then play - it's not that cool either. After all, it took some time before I was even ready to play again, and then it took some time before I knew if I wanted to play in Astralis again or what was going to happen. There were some other projects up in the air and I was still on sick leave.

In perhaps the most personal topic discussed in the interview, the player discussed his relationship with his girlfriend. The Dane moved to Sweden around 2018, continuing to play under the Astralis banner for many years till his eventual move to NiP. However, it wasn't very long after he became a Ninja that he found out that his girlfriend had cheated on him with one of his friends.

Interviewer: "So you move to Sweden (switching to NiP, ed.), and two months later you find out that she's been with your best friend up there?
dev1ce: "Yes, or at least one of my good mates up there."
Interviewer: "For a long period of time?"
dev1ce: "Yes. Apparently a lot of people knew it. I didn't know it myself. It was very special, cinematic, a strange feeling, and that's also why I was isolated up there (in Sweden, ed.) and like had no network other than NiP.”

In addition to these issues, the player also discussed other topics like dealing with personal loss before a Major, the start of his career and the story of Astralis' inception, how the team found the investor Nikolaj Nyholm and initially set the organization up as a partially player-owned setup.