Efficient everything: PS5s, game engines, downloads! Plus: NCSoft GHG mysteries & Europe's first solar barge – GTG Links 64
Hello! It seems like everyone but me has been on holiday recently, but I've been head down and working hard – more exciting new updates to the SGA Standard coming very soon, with lots of potential to measure and reduce emissions across the game industry. I've also given myself food poisoning this week (I suspect), so this one may be briefer than usual!
SGA Energy efficiency meetup recording
If you weren't able to make it in person to our fantastic SGA meetup on optimising games to save power, the video is now up on YouTube. This was a great time, and we covered some super interesting ground.
Here's a little excerpt of a contribution from attendee Ari Arnbjörnsson (of Epic Games), where he describes the co-benefits of optimising for blisteringly fast FPS when that same game also ends up on lesser hardware.
And if that piqued your interest – here's the full recording. I give my own little summary of how I see game optimisation as part of the long continuity of game history from the 80s to today.
Sony is shipping a “power saver” mode for the PS5
“With this update, you may notice a new option in your settings menu called Power Saver. While this feature won’t be available during the beta phase, once it officially launches, supported PS5 games will scale back performance**** and will allow your PS5 to reduce its power consumption when the feature is enabled optionally by gamers. If not enabled, or if games do not support the feature, the performance will not be scaled back and power consumption will not be reduced.
We’ll share more details on this new option as we get closer to launch, including supported PS5 games and estimated impact, so stay tuned!”
We'll be keeping an eye on this one!
Shuzo Kikuchi
Unity’s 2024 ESG report is out
Still in that flash new interactive format. Here's my summary:
- Emissions are down overall (woo) – Buildings and Scope 2 electricity emissions have fallen the most
- Cloud emissions have grown to be the biggest Scope 3 category for Unity, doubling since 2021. That pesky AI footprint – at a guess.
NCSoft’s ESG report is out
This is an interesting one. NCSoft seem to have made a substantial reduction over 2023's total. Here's this year's table.
In 2024 (this most recent report) the total including subsidiaries is about 94k tonnes, which is a big drop from 2023, which came in at over 190k tonnes. And they've done it while slightly expanding the number of Scope 3 categories included (not including Scope 3.11 'use of sold products' though). What are the main drivers of change? Huge cuts to purchased goods and services (Cat 1: 74,000 -> 28,000), and business travel (Cat 6: 34,000 -> 400) plus smaller amounts all over. But hardly any change to Scope 1 or 2 emissions – which is where you would expect the easiest emissions savings to come from.
Huh. So that's a strange result indeed. The business travel figure seems the most odd to me. Did no one from NCSoft really fly for business in 2024? Can that be possible? I know it was a lean year for the industry by that seems... implausible to me. Maybe I'm wrong, and they really did hunker down and everyone just stayed home – I don't know. Please reach out if you know more! Most companies that cut their emissions in half year on year would be shouting that from the rooftops... but not here. What's going on in Seongnam remains, for now, a mystery.
Perfect World’s ESG Report is out
Though, sadly for us, they haven't disclosed any GHG emissions that I could spot. They have done a climate risk analysis though – apologies for the low quality of the Google Translate photos of my laptop screen. They've noted several different acute (transient or passing) risks such as power shortages, data centre impacts, and damage to offices, as well as chronic (ongoing) risks such as sea level rise. Shanghai is after all very much exposed to sea level rise.
Gameloft Paris is looking for a CSR intern
And Bath Spa has a research assistant position going on AI & environment
Symposium on game cultures and net zero
Teesside University
Packing game files on steam for energy efficiency
This looks like really useful advice for games with large install sizes. The Scope 3.9 downloads component of the SGA Standard helps users to accurately reflect (or even predict) the GHG reductions that could come from efficiently packing files like this... just a thought!
Amazon’s sustainability report is out
Interesting choice of colour scheme in the GHG charts! White for direct GHG emissions. Just the froth on the top (fifteen million tonnes of froth) I guess. Also an interesting choice to not stick with conventional labels like "Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3". Someone's been paying a lot of attention to branding this year.
Here's the direct link to the Report. [PDF]
AI used to help drill more oil
“From what I saw, I believe that finding and extracting more oil is one of the biggest use cases of AI today,” he said. He said he tried to find examples of customers using the climate-friendly AI tools he was making, but “it’s very difficult to find them, or at least ones that were operating at any significant scale.”
Holly said she was most surprised at Microsoft’s capacity for massive hypocrisy on climate. “We kept thinking we must be missing something,” she said. “But the more contracts we saw, the more we realized there’s just a part of Microsoft that just wants to make money, and this is where the money is, with no guardrails or accountability mechanisms in place.”
Emily Atkin
Data & Society policy brief
I have not had a chance to read this yet but it looks good!
Consumer power bills subsidising big tech
Sasha Luccioni, Yacine Jernite
Capacity for “nature based solutions” to climate mitigation? Looking like zero...
Ouch. “If we plan restoration targets to match future climatic conditions and consider state transitions of currently natural ecosystems due to climate change, the potential for natural climate solutions related to ecosystem restoration is close to zero.”
— Ryan Katz-Rosene, PhD (@ryankatzrosene.bsky.social) 2025-08-01T03:21:16.496Z
The UK now experiences “notably different” climate to what it used to be
On a more hopeful note
Georgina Jedikovska
And here's a bit of game-tech silliness for you
I never thought I would ever get to say that I learned something about how multiplayer server logic works from a meme account called "Full Stack Peter Griffin".
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