Greening the Games Industry

GDC24 – What are all those flights costing the planet, and what should be done about it?

I did way too much flying last year. While looking at places to live as part of a move interstate, I went between Sydney and Melbourne more times than I care to admit. Because of the woeful state of Australia’s intercity train network (which I wrote about here and

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Supporter bonus: What’s going on with corporate ESG?

Nat Bullard does a huge slide deck presentation every year outlining the massive forces shaping the economic terrain on which climate and corporate action are enacted. It’s a 200-page deck and for a lot of people that’s too much to wade through, so as promised in last Friday’

GTG Links 40 – We're so back: with big tech & AI impacts, Ethiopian petrol car bans, and huuuuuge new climate democracy research

We're back after our extended break, with a post positively overflowing with new news from the last month (!) of climate action. Before we get stuck in a brief update – we are holding the first of our meetings with already committed and potential founding members of the Sustainable Games

March update: Game layoffs and sustainability, benchmarking, and the Sustainable Games Alliance

It’s been a while since I last wrote for the newsletter. My last links post also only went out to GTG Supporter tier subscribers (despite having a large free preview, as always!) because I picked the wrong setting on the post, so it might seem even longer than it

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GTG Links 39 – Estimating footprints for Roblox + reaching the limits of console energy efficiency ++ a primer on atmospheric rivers

Roblox full-year financial results for 2023 are out, and they got a ton of attention. With "Revenue was $749.9 million” what sort of emissions footprint might we expect from that? Based on last year’s industry average, I’d expect around 128k tonnes CO2e off the back of

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European Gaming Emissions, and how we address them

I was asked earlier this week by Joost Raessens (Utrecht University Professor, and coordinator of STRATEGIES: Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries a major Horizon-funded research project just kicking off) about whether there were any solid figures for the scale of the footprint of the European games industry. I

GTG Links 38 – 2023 hardware numbers + nuclear data centres ++ the end of discs?

David Lumb’s CNET article is out I think he worked on this one for most of last year. We first chatted about the topic pre-GDC last year, a lot has happened since. Nice to see it out finally. Video Games Are Finally Waking Up to Climate ChangeWhat will games

GDC’s State of the Industry survey on sustainability in 2024

For the past three years, GDC’s annual survey of attendees – the somewhat ambitiously named “State of the Industry” survey – has asked at least one question about sustainability. Let’s look at the evolution of both the questions themselves and the responses, and see what it can tell us about

GTG Links 37 – Another year closer to climate deadlines

Welcome back – I hope you had a good Christmas and New Year. 2024 is shaping up to be a big year, with some pretty significant changes. The planet is hotter than it has ever been in human history. The pace of change continues to lag behind what the science says

Nvidia's DLSS carbon impacts: the cost-benefit of upscaling, frame generation, and neutral network training

Late last year I got a new graphics card for my PC – a rather modest new Nvidia RTX 4060 which is pretty much perfect for the games I play. It’s a mid-tier card, but still a huge upgrade (now approaching 7 years old) GTX 1070 that I had been

🔗GTG Links 36 – End of year wrap up + Fortnite traffic spikes, AI energy, King of the Carbon Hill

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas (i.e. hot) in Australia. It's also really close to the end of the year – and what a year! In the last 12 months of the newsletter, we've written about: * How exposed the game industry is

Now Available: AfterClimate's flagship report, The Game Industry Sustainability Benchmark 2023

I believe having good data about where, why, and how emissions are occurring across the games industry is a necessary first step in enabling effective action to reduce those emissions. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. It is in keeping with that approach that I am super

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🔗GTG Links 35 – DiGRA climate papers, Govt CO2 legislation updates and promising CleanTech

After the Game Awards rescinded their invitation to game writer (and friend of GTG) Meghna Jayanth (Thirsty Suitors) to present one of their awards, after she communicated that she had a speech prepared on Palestine, an open letter is circulating asking the org and the wider industry to not remain

How much electricity do gamers use annually? – Can we put a number on the footprint of the games industry, Part 4

This year I’ve been revisiting the very rough early estimates I made in the process of writing Digital Games After Climate Change – trying to come up with a number for the total emissions footprint of the global games industry. There’s a new report out by Activate Consulting (spotted

🔗 GTG Links 34 – All about hardware + minerals + conflict

I've been at a couple of events this week, both virtually and in person, which delayed this weeks post a bit. Read on for the latest happenings. This week, the full post is free for all subscribers. It's been over a month since the start of

What I learned about repair by disassembling my iMac

While working on the Die Gute Fabrik report last month, I needed to open some very large spreadsheets. Both the US EEIO model of spend-data emissions factors and the European EXIOBASE model have huge datasets – one single EXIOBASE sheet can be over 700 MB and a whole dataset can be

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🔗 GTG Links 33 – In these turbulent times, news and updates will continue until morale improves

This week's is a looooong one. There's a lot going on. At the same time, it seems like a sheer indulgence to post about videogames – even inflected through the important lens of sustainability and climate – whilst daily in Gaza hundreds of civilians are killed and entire

Climate Catharsis: A review of How to Blow up a Pipeline

I don’t know about you, but paying attention to the latest news from the climate frontlines can be pretty exhausting. Good news is few and far between, and the last couple of months have been particularly filled with bad. This week, Hurricane Otis killed at least 27 people in

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🔗 GTG Links 32 – Nice New Net Zero News, & more

Just a super quick one this week – I'm writing this from SXSW Sydney which has been happening this week. I was on a panel on Wednesday afternoon about what an ethical games industry looks like (naturally, it looks like a sustianable, net zero one!). On the panel with

✈️💻🚅🕹️How much CO2 does it take to make an indie game? Calculating the footprint of Die Gute Fabrik’s Saltsea Chronicles

As I teased the other week, I’ve been working on calculations and a report on the entire development process for Die Gute Fabrik’s new game Saltsea Chronicles. That report is now complete, as is the the game itself. This year I’ve been revisiting the emissions calculations I

🔗GTG Links 31 – EA disclosures, new EU rules, and EU citizen attitudes on climate change

Have you dug into the net zero snapshot yet? People* are calling it "a singular achievement", "a tour de force of sustainability" and "the most exciting bit of games' news this whole year!" 🥅👌 The 2023 net zero snapshot is live – tell your friendsThe

🥅👌 The 2023 net zero snapshot is live – tell your friends

The culmination of months of work collecting, scrutinising, and entering data from ESG reports from across the entire games industry is now complete. The AfterClimate 2023 Net Zero snapshot is now live on the website. I'll keep this bit brief, because I want you to go read the

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🔗 GTG Links 30 – In case of natural disaster: leave the photos, take the PS5

It's been a year for climate-related disasters – from the Canadian wildfires to the horrendous floods in Libya. In the US alone: "So far, the total cost of disasters in 2023 is more than $57.6bn, according to Noaa. The record figure does not include major disasters such

Xbox Gamepass players energy consumption & emissions💨🍃Can we put a number on the game industry’s annual GHG impact? Part 3

Alright, it's time to get back to the main game – putting a figure on the total GHG footprint of the games industry. This time we’re interested in those pesky downstream emissions that happen whenever people actually play our games. For that, we need a couple of pieces

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🔗GTG Links 29: Power, Plants, and Play

A lot more games companies have completed their annual sustainability reporting, and the data is currently being disgested into the convoluted bowels of the increasingly powerful net zero snapshot spreadsheet. We're getting reeeeeal close to being able to give a seriously comprehensive update on the games industry'