Saltsea Chronicles creators’ climate report aims to make games industry change

Saltsea Chronicles is set in a world rebuilt after ecological crisis and planetary flooding; it’s a world that’s not our own, but could someday be. The mythology of the game recalls a time when a group of people called “hoarders” took too much from the land, building up its treasures far too high. Seas rose up to meet the treasures and left only islands in saltsea.

Developer Die Gute Fabrik’s take on Earth’s current climate crisis is easily recognizable in Saltsea Chronologies It’s not the first game to take on our environmental impact on the planet, but it It is a good idea to use a bilingual translator one of the first — if not the first — to build out and publish a report explicitly detailing the studio’s impact on the climate across its development period. “Saltsea ChroniclesIt is set in a world that has been flooded after a major climate change. I’m a storyteller by trade, and that story is easier to tell to the world than ‘a year in [Die Gute Fabrik]’; here’s a game after a disaster, here’s how its production impacted our own,” Die Gute Fabrik CEO Hannah Nicklin told Polygon in an email interview.

AfterClimate was hired (a firm that assists studios in achieving climate impact targets) as well as Dr. Ben Abraham who is a games researcher. Digital Games After Climate Change, to author the report and put a number on the studio’s CO2 equivalent emissions from January 2020 until October 2023 — the span of Saltsea Chronicles’ development. These results provide a detailed look at how a small independent developer who works from home impacts the environment. It’s also a call for studios to make change. As Dr. Abraham puts it, the way things are now can’t go on forever.

“Fundamentally, if you care about video games, you should care about the long term sustainability of game making,” Dr. Abraham told Polygon over email. “It’s no secret that there are aspects of the game industry that are deeply unsustainable from the perspective of work-life balance: from crunch, to unpredictable layoffs, the uncertainty of funding for the next project. But there’s an even wider sense in which games are unsustainable ecologically.”

Nicklin & Dr. Abraham discuss why they are so important in a recent email-based interview. Saltsea Chronicles’ climate report is crucial step for video game development.

Image: Die Gute Fabrik

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

Why was this report commissioned by Polygon? Why is the studio’s climate impact important?

Hannah Nicklin: The obvious answer, of course, is to better understand Die Gute Fabrik’s impact on climate crisis. As you may read in the report, I’ve been an activist and advocate for climate action ever since I can remember — one of my earliest memories is learning about flooding in my home county of Lincolnshire, U.K.. A large amount of my activism and art over my adult life has been connected to climate. While I’ve tried to do a few things in Die Gute Fabrik that would reduce the impact of our game, I was stuck on how to change and what we were already doing to minimize our impact. That’s why I wanted to ask an expert to assess us, and it felt ‘right’ to assess the whole of the game’s production rather than a single year. Saltsea ChroniclesThe game is set after the great climate catastrophe in an flooded earth. I’m a storyteller by trade, and that story is easier to tell to the world than ‘a year in DGF’; here’s a game after a disaster, here’s how its production impacted our own.

I fervently believe that climate crisis is an existential and urgent thread — more important and more connected to almost everything, connected to racial justice, to Indigenous rights, to economic and worker justice, gender, disability, all of it. People who are most oppressed by our system will be the first to suffer if our climate spirals beyond targets scientists have warned us of for years. It’s obvious that it pales in contrast to the impacts on humans, but video games are also impossible on a planet without life. The climate crisis poses a threat to the future of video games.

In the context of all of that I’m always trying to find ways to act, there’s never going to be One Amazing Way To Fix Your Climate Impact, basically all of the problems in this world are in my opinion approached by a ‘path of least harm’ which admits that some battles are unwinnable, what matters is that we chart the most ethical path through them. The data and power I had to order a study was a great way for us to learn more about the impacts of making games like this. Saltsea Chronicles is, and so I’m better equipped to chart a better path with the next games we make.

Why should game studios’ climate impact matter to others in the video game industry?

Abraham:If you are interested in video games you need to be concerned about their long-term sustainability. It’s no secret that there are aspects of the game industry that are deeply unsustainable from the perspective of work-life balance: from crunch, to unpredictable layoffs, the uncertainty of funding for the next project. But there’s an even wider sense in which games are unsustainable ecologically. Although we know that games make billions each year, the greenhouse gas emission costs to our planet are still estimated. The ability of studios to provide more detailed data will help to ensure the sustainability of the industry as we transition to a lower-carbon economy.

From an entirely self-interested perspective, the games industry should care about the climate impact of game making because it’s also going to cost more to keep emitting CO2 in the future. One example: Microsoft has a net zero target that is less than seven years off, and if your game development is done in a way that produces tons of emissions and you want to be on Xbox — your emissions are their emissions. If you don’t find a way to minimize that impact you will end up spending a lot of money on CO2 emission removals. It will almost certainly be many times cheaper, and more effective, to prevent your own emissions in the first place than to try and “fix” them later on with costly CO2 removals

There is also evidence that we have players. The following are some of the ways to improve your own ability.The majority of gamers care about their impact on the world. According to research by Unity and Harvard, the gaming industry is responsible for its own footprint. This makes sense since gamers share our planet, so there is a common interest in seeing games made better and more sustainably to make sure the industry will be here for many years to come. It might not happen tomorrow, but on a long-enough timeline sustainability becomes an existential requirement for any industry, and an extremely serious risk for any one that doesn’t have solutions for decarbonisation. We are barreling towards a world of net zero commitments – most of the countries in the world are only a few decades away. It’s never been more urgent that we get this right for the same of games and the planet itself.

What are the main conclusions you drew from the report? What is the plan for DGF in future?

Nicklin: So, obviously right now we’re very full-on with the Satlsea Chronicles launch, so in the immediate term that’s our main focus, but quite soon after we’ll switch to beginning to prototype our next title, and that’s when I’m going to sit down with the board and the production team and plot in how we’re going to respond in detail to the reports findings.

First, the recommendations seem pretty obvious: with our data, we can easily assess how well we’ve done. We also know it’s easy to set up a system of annual accounting and to establish targets. Then, we just have to start trying to achieve them. But there were still surprises in there for me — cut flowers, for example! We send flowers to the team to celebrate milestones or birthdays — it’s an easy gift to make equal for everyone, and also there aren’t many online stores in some countries you can send gifts from at all, but it seems all countries have flower shops. As a remote studio it’s a small way of making the studio feel present for everyone. But if the emissions are as much as they appear, then maybe we need to do some local research on each of the countries our team members live in so we’re buying local flowers only.

And then there’s heating energy — some of our team are based in countries like Denmark where energy is much greener, heating comes from a communal district supply drawn as surplus from processing biomass, for example. But I’m based in the UK, I have a fairly old gas-powered combi boiler. I’ve changed my hob to induction, but I just can’t afford solar and air-source heating right now. Would the company match funding for people who are in my role? Or if it’s as simple as switching to another provider for your electricity, why not offer people paid time to do the admin and research? Sometimes all you need to make a change is the time to catch your breath, what if we made it clear that’s ‘work’ that can be billed to us?

It’s also an obvious solution, but it requires more effort from those who are more influential in the games. For example no one in the company flew for the company for the first 3 years in which the game was developed, but in launch year I have to try and secure funding for what’s next, we have to do an MVP of promoting the game IRL. I think we fly less than some indies, and I’ve gotten trains to Europe fairly frequently, but we have three to four return flights to the USA and Australia on our books for launch year, and I will need to fly to GDC again next year with our next game’s demo, and that stuff is in the hands of the people with power. If money or culture is not held in hybrid physical space, then it’s either in the form of cash. If I don’t fund our next game there’s no guarantee the studio will be able to continue, and I’m much more likely to do that by being present at GDC.

So, I think there’s a climate justice (and disability justice — we’re still in the era of COVID) urgency in more local events, and more hybrid events. The less powerful people will still turn to the platforms, publishers and conferences until they make a move. There is only one other alternative (which I am sure to be in favor of): unionisation for all employees and studio professionals.

Another takeaway for me along those collective lines is that it can’t just be the big organisations and studios that act. It’s really simple actually: net zero is made up of everyone, after the big studios make changes the emissions remaining will belong to studios like Die Gute Fabrik and others a bit bigger and a bit smaller than us. I think Dr. Abraham’s recommendation around eco-labelling there is really fascinating — holding one another to account, but also just everyone counting in the first place.

Finaly, for our report we concentrated on emissions and impacts upstream. But I’m willing to bet that a firm with Steam’s position and power could introduce downstream impact accounting in a way which would far exceed what was possible. Even capturing 10-20% of the data on energy use for Steam games (where they’re played, on what devices, and on average what a device of that spec demands for the game in question) could help us begin to tackle that as a field. When we are armed with data, it is time to take action. And I suppose I hope that’s what this report communicates: action is urgent, here’s some ways we can do it, let’s start.

Abraham: Indie game production has a much smaller impact than Triple A games, in both terms of absolute numbers and in relative ones that reflect the comparisons of businesses with different sizes. There’s just something about making indie games that means it doesn’t come with the same climate costs as the latest Call of Duty, for instance, or a big live service game.

Indie developers are therefore in an excellent position to begin the shift to a sustainable gaming industry. This is despite the fact that there are many elements of this transition which will need action by the platform and major player owners. Indies have a great opportunity to influence their audience and connect with gamers that care about climate change.

Read Die Gute Fabrik’s full report here.