Greening the Games Industry

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After the Game Awards rescinded their invitation to game writer (and friend of GTG) Meghna Jayanth (Thirsty Suitors) to present one of their awards, after she communicated that she had a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'

The best of corporate ESG Art in 2023

Hey before I jump into this week's post – I just wanted to let you know I have a new piece of writing out in the Cordite Poetry Review. It's a bit outside the typical outlets I write for, but it's called "How to

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🔗 GTG Links 28 – T2 emissions, Twitch & sustainability influence investors, & more sustainability laws

At Gamescom this week Microsoft Xbox won the new Playing for the Planet Green Studio of the Year award. The official Xbox news post about it had this quote: Playing for the Planet credited this win to the efforts of Xbox to drive action beyond the borders of our own

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What if games came with a CO2 emissions label?

Earlier this year, I set out to answer that question – posed initially by Marina Psaros who was (at the time) working for Unity in SF as their sustainability team lead. Would there be a benefit to putting some sort of sticker or label on game boxes and store pages? Could

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🔗 GTG Links 27 – Degradeable games, ESG due dilligence & surprising storage media power findings

Greetings GTG readers, I hope you're doing well and staying away from climate disasters – fires, floods, heatwaves, we are seeing it all. It's been an extremely busy week both personally and professionally, but I've still managed to round up pieces on games designed for

What does designing for energy efficient games look like?

Back in March, right after GDC, I wrote a piece about the Microsoft Xbox sustainability team’s work to put live power draw numbers front and centre on Xbox devkits, and integrate real world telemetry from actual Xboxes out in the wild. At the time, I was really excited for

GTG Links 26 – Sustainability reports galore

A nice quick one this week. The dichotomy of ESG setting science-based targets // achieving science-based targets pic.twitter.com/73CRpt9o8v — Richard Waite (@waiterich) July 22, 2023 Amazon’s latest sustainability report has some gems in it 9 takeaways from Amazon’s 2022 Sustainability ReportThe annual report describes how we’re

🌿 Green New Deal Simulator brings the 🔋✨vibes✨♻️ we need 🐸

Green New Deal Simulator is a free new game by Molleindustria – the art/games project by designer Paolo Pedercini (who also made Phone Story, Every Day the Same Dream, among other classics). It’s a lite deck-builder, in which the player takes on the role of a powerful government agency,