How the video game industry is reducing its impact on climate change

We have witnessed the impacts of climate change over decades. According to NASA, the planet’s average surface temperature has risen around 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century. Since 1969, the ocean has seen an average temperature increase of more than 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Between 1993-1999, the average loss of ice from the ice sheet was 279 million tons per year. Global sea levels have risen by eight inches over the past century.

These effects are only a small piece of the byproduct of humanity’s rapid technological and industrial development. Our continuous push for innovation contributes to CO2 (CO2) emission, which has resulted in more CO2 being in our atmosphere today than any time since human history. In an ominous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2021, the United Nations reported, “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.” And a big part of that influence comes from our entertainment production, which includes nearly all aspects of the game industry, thanks to its reliance on computing, servers, manufacturing, distribution, and more.

Gaming serves as an escape from the horrors of real life, but it’s also one of the largest contributors to one of our biggest fears. That doesn’t mean that the industry isn’t working to slow its impact on climate change, though. Many companies actually work to reduce their carbon footprint.

The role of games in climate change

In 2020, Sony energy policy analyst Joshua Aslan conducted a study on PlayStation 4’s European install base. Aslan took into account all PS4s that were sold in Europe and calculated the electricity usage. His study concluded that “if high estimates for console usage (4.4 hours per day) are representative of actual usage, then lifetime electricity use could be as high as 27 terawatt-hours for all PS4 units in Europe.” Aslan noted that this was approximately equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of Hungary circa 2018. The terawatt-hours Ecuador used in 2016 was also outpaced by this.

This could be multiplied across many platforms globally, with energy-demanding computers, such as the PCs that energy experts Nathaniel Mills and Evan Mills believe will consume around 1,400 kilowatt hours per computer annually. In their article “Taming the energy use of gaming computers” they state, “The kilowatt-hours used by gaming PCs yearly is equivalent to the energy use of ten game consoles, six standard PCs, or three refrigerators.”

“So that gives you a bit of a sense of the scope of everything,” says climate and sustainability researcher Ben Abraham.

Abraham is at work on a book entitled Digital Games After Climate ChangeHis research into the implications of climate change for games is available in this article.

“I did a survey at the start of 2020 to ask game developers things like, ‘How do you feel about the climate crisis? Are you concerned about it?’ All sorts of things like that,” Abraham says. “The big number that I came up with, gathered from energy usage figures from corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility reports — plus the survey included things like carbon emissions and energy intensity — was 1 to 5 tons of CO2 per employee per year.” The greenhouse gasses released in these emissions are what damage the atmosphere and cause global warming. To visualize, Building Energy, a group that tasks itself with decreasing building energy use to combat climate change, states, “A ton of CO2 would fill a modest one story ranch house with a footprint of 1250 sq feet and an average height of 13 feet.” The more of this thermal energy used, the more damage is done to the atmospheric bubble, which means a warmer planet and more destroyed environments.

Abraham found that every company, studio, and developer he gathered data on — including Ubisoft, Nintendo, and Microsoft — were all somewhere in the range of generating 1 to 5 tons of CO2 per employee per year. Add that to the global number of game designers (both in office settings and at home, which he believes is between 500,000-four million), and you get somewhere from three million to fifteen million tons CO2 annually due to the production of the games. And this number is just coming from the carbon emissions of the energy used in gaming development offices, whether that energy be attributed to computer usage, running servers, or even just keeping the lights on — not playing them, not getting them into the hands of players, not thinking about the waste like discs going into landfills, and not the servers being played on.

“That’s a huge figure,” Abraham says. “It puts the game development industry at around the same emissions intensity as the total 2018 emissions for the European country of Slovenia, with a population of about 2 million people. It also means that the global film industry emissions are at the low end of our possible range of emissions from game production.” The Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Group shared an infographic showing the benefits of preventing one million tons of CO2 emissions. At just one million, the graph clearly shows the extent of the problem. When multiplied with Abraham’s three to 15 million calculation, it’s easy to see why so many are looking to resolve the issue fast.

The problem can also be caused by consoles. In his book, Abraham performs tests on the PlayStation 4’s central processing unit. Abraham performs mass spectrometry on the PlayStation 4’s central processing unit. This is an experiment that measures the mass-to charge ratio of any one or more molecules in the sample. It also reveals the entire atomic component. His element of choice is titanium. It must first be mined from the ground. Then it has to refined and shipped all over the globe to make this console. Abraham said that the issue of high emission intensity presents a challenge.

“And all these things are inside our gaming devices,” Abraham says. “So that’s a really tough challenge. And I think we’re decades and decades away from being able to do that sustainably.”

The cycle of technology-related upgrade culture is another issue. The new generation consoles are infused with tons CO2. Even more so with the numerous upgrade models of smartphones that come out every season. Just this year alone we’ve seen the release of multiple versions of the iPhone 13, Google Pixel 6, Samsung Galaxy, and more. That’s not even looking at the continued production of previous iterations of these devices. Each of these devices means more CO2 is being released through both their production and our daily usage. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that around 21% (or 26%) of America’s electricity is generated by renewable energy as of 2020. This means the rest of the nation, whether it’s through charging a phone or playing a gaming console, is powered by an energy grid running on fossil fuels that continuously release CO2 emissions.

All the energy and resulting CO2 emissions don’t just power the industry and go away. The atmosphere is damaged, which leads to climate damage. Furthermore, the industry’s dependence on fossil fuel power has an even greater environmental impact. “Unearthing, processing, and moving underground oil, gas, and coal deposits take an enormous toll on our landscapes and ecosystems,” says the National Resources Defense Council. “The fossil fuel industry leases vast stretches of land for infrastructure such as wells, pipelines, access roads, as well as facilities for processing, waste storage, and waste disposal. For strip mining, large areas of land are blasted and scraped to expose underground oil or coal. Even after operations cease, the nutrient-leached land will never return to what it once was.” This leads to land turned into empty waste and left desolate with no use to humans or the wildlife that once roamed it.

How developers of games can lessen their impact

It is possible to reduce the impact of the gaming industry’s footprint. While some say games companies should try persuading players to turn an eye to the climate crisis, Abraham believes that isn’t the best use of our time and effort right now.

“That sort of stuff might be something we could do down the track,” he says. “But we need to be more focused on immediate reductions. Our carbon emissions must be reduced immediately. One of the best ways for game developers to do that is actually to focus in their workplace and ask themselves, ‘What are we emitting? What amount of energy do we use? Do we buy renewable energy or are we consuming it? Can we do that?’”

In a conversation about Wargaming Sydney’s (the company behind World of Tanks) switch to renewable energy with the company’s chief technology officer, Simon Hayes, Abraham found that a switch to recyclable power was very easy.

“They just went out and found a different power provider that was going to offset all of the 100% green or offset energy. Their power bill was significantly lower than they used to pay, and it saved them money. They’ve got a few other things that they’re doing as well in their office. Like offering to pay for employee usage of public transportation and planning to produce a system to document all their international travel.”

The larger companies at the top end of the market, such as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, use a lot of renewable energy.

“You can dig into the annual corporate social responsibility reports and see Nintendo is using 98% renewable power already,” Abraham says.

We also received documentation from other companies, indicating that work is being done in order to make the industry more carbon-neutral.

EA was quick to share its desire to make public its sustainability operations plan when EA was contacted. EA published its 2020 Impact report. Abraham alerted Abraham that EA underestimated its energy use at 93 MWh (or 9,300 kWh). This error was most likely due. The report was corrected with a more credible figure of 95,000,000kWh.EA claims it wants to lower its carbon footprint and make better office and energy management decisions. It also revealed that EA encourages digital downloading over purchasing physical games. EA projected that 49% would download its games digitally in 2020, an increase of 33% from fiscal 2017.

Though, as Abraham says in a comment on EA’s latest impact report, this is hardly something that EA needed to actually do anything to encourage. According to its latest impact report, the company has continued its pursuit of sustainability and managing environmental impact by 2021. This company has a range of sustainability strategies. These include using room sensors and LED lighting to decrease energy use, and buying environmentally-friendly supplies. They also partner with cloud providers to increase energy efficiency.

EA states that their efforts have led to the following:

• A variety of LED projects can reduce your annual energy consumption by 800 kWh
• Annual reduction of 820,000 kWh from LED retrofits, voltage harmonizer and automated light sweeps
• There were 30,906 metric tons of waste diverted to landfill for recycling or compost
• Five million gallons each year of recycled water is used in landscaping

“Interestingly the report still doesn’t actually put a figure on their CO2 emissions anywhere that I could find,” Abraham says. “Which is disappointing because it means we have to estimate from their energy consumed, which will always be less accurate than if they just told us themselves based on what their energy mix of renewables vs fossil fuel generated power is and the emissions factors. Not very ambitious, and disappointing to have to do our own estimates of CO2 emissions based on energy consumption figures.”

Google also provided some information to show its progress on sustainability which Abraham had nothing but praise for, saying “Google have put a fair lot of work into their carbon footprint. Their data center stuff looks great. I thought that Microsoft was the biggest corporate purchaser of renewable power in the U.S., but perhaps they’ve recently been overtaken!”

Google had a conversation about sustainability practices and it revealed:

Xbox finally made this statement:

“Microsoft is committed to sustainability and, as we look at the new generation of gaming with Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, we’re continuing to explore how we can reduce our environmental impact across the product life cycle, from conceptualization, design, production, and packaging, to what happens once our consoles are in the hands of consumers and at their end-of-life. We’ll have more to share on Xbox sustainability efforts in the future.”

Xbox sent what its achieved in its race to be the leading name in gaming’s carbon battle:

• “We recently incorporated post-consumer recycled (PCR) resins for the first time in any Xbox hardware for our Electric Volt and Daystrike Camo Special Edition controllers. Both controllers contain a portion of resins made from recycled materials like automotive headlight covers, plastic water jugs, and CDs.”
• “In addition, most of the color options for our controllers in the Xbox Design Lab are made with 30% PCR materials by weight.”
• “Earlier this year, the Xbox team also rolled out a new feature that reduces power from 15W to less than 2W when the device is in energy-saving mode.”

One of the company’s most ambitious goals is to become completely carbon-negative by the year 2030.

“That’s a more ambitious target than most,” Abraham says. “It’s way more ambitious than most countries, which are just aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050.”

It is too late for us to make a change.

Climate change has been a known threat since the ‘70s, and Abraham believes the work should have started as soon as it was learned of and continued throughout his entire lifetime. “The signs are just so fucking obvious now people can’t ignore it anymore,” he says. There’s so much that can and needs to be done that even today would be a great starting point, but that doesn’t make it any less of a challenge.

“We need to be cutting emissions everywhere and anywhere we can. That’s partly why I focus on the development side of things rather than other areas. Changing over your power company to 100% renewable, that’s easy,” Abraham says.” You can do that in a couple of days and then you’re already making a huge difference. While other areas of the game industry can be much more challenging. Producing a brand new console without having any sort of embedded carbon emissions in it is going to be a really fucking hard challenge.”

While it seems like the push for change has come late, it’s still never too late to start chasing a negative carbon footprint. To tackle this problem head-on, it will require a lot from everyone, including consumers, producers, and suppliers.