On Hiatus – so go read our 'Hot Games' Paper
Hello GTG readers – this is a very overdue update to give you a heads-up that I'm currently taking a bit of a break from regular newsletter posts. Don't worry! Nothing bad has happened; in fact, the opposite – I've been spending the past month with my new kid. And she's doing great – she's a big, happy and healthy kiddo (and her mum is doing well too).
It's quite possible I'll be flat out to the end of the year with SGA work. Which is best to follow via the SGA newsletter (scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up). 2027 is going to be pretty cool though!
But hopefully I'll get time to write again soon, and drop some analysis of game ESG reports into an inbox near you at some point before the end of the year.
In the mean time – you can check out this conference paper that Mike Hazas, Kevin Dalli, Arjun Menon and I recently shared from a conference presentation last month. The paper – which hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, but we hope to refine for a journal submission – is called “Hot Games: A Holistic Assessment of the Planet Warming Emissions of Video Games based on 2024–2025 Data”. It’s basically a (better!) version of what I’ve been trying to do here over the years, bringing together different estimates from a variety of sources to draw some order-of-magnitude conclusions about the annual impact of digital games on global carbon emissions.
The headline figure of this estimate is 62.5 million tonnes of CO2 every year – which is smack-bang in the middle of the range that I’ve been saying is likely for a while now.
My contribution to the estimate has been mostly work I’ve written about here – for the game development segment, I added up the totals disclosed in game industry ESG reports, and applied some projections for certain large ones that did not disclose footprints. For the gameplay segment, I contributed an estimate of the Steam hours-played total across 2025 based on public website data, which I’ve also written about before here.
The other new bits of work are from the other team members. One uses bandwidth data for Steam downloads, which is a nice and novel approach I haven’t seen taken before, and cloud gaming estimates based on subscriptions and other averages, but which is really starting to add up. That was a bit of a surprise to me. It’s a short enough paper that you should just go read it yourself, though!
The benefit of a new paper like this is that it now gives us a little bit more certainty about exactly the scale of impacts that the games industry is having every single year on the planet. It’s a very rough initial picture of the rate of impact, and I think we need to see it in the wider context of an assessment of how the global community is doing on the massive challenge of climate change.
After the year that we've just had, and the El Niño we're about to have, there's never been a more urgent time to talk about how we get those numbers down in the games industry – even with all the other challenges the industry faces.
As always – thanks for reading GTG!