Greening the Games Industry

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After the Game Awards rescinded their invitation to game writer (and friend of GTG) Meghna Jayanth (Thirsty Suitors) to present one of their awards, after she communicated that she had a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

GTG Links #25 – The One With Every ESG Report (almost)

As promised, the end of the financial year has brought with it a flood of new ESG reporting. Here's the most interesting bits so far, plus a bunch more developments around corporate target setting, climate anxiety research, talks on gamers and sustainability, ESG ratings divergence, and the CO2

Can we put a number on the game industry’s annual GHG impact? Part 2 – Disc & Digital Distribution

In the previous post in this series, I outlined a very rough guesstimate of the game industry’s annual CO2 emissions from making games, including all related up-stream value chain activities. Before we get to the real meat and potatoes of downstream use of sold products (i.e. playing games)

GTG links #24: The One About Supply Chains & Carbon Credits | June 30

Every links post I think to myself "this will be the last one overloaded with news" and every time I'm wrong. There's too much going on, everyone needs to slow down and take a break. Until then, we perservere. Potential super El Niño building

An update on Scope 3 upstream development emissions & the results of the GTG reader survey

This week I wanted to get out the second part of my series on the footprint of the games industry, looking at game distribution emissions. Alas, I didn’t finish it in time so instead, here’s a short update on the figures from last time – plus the results of

GTG links no.23 – Jun 16

Unity's 2022 ESG report is out And here's a page with some highlights from it, though unfortunately in terms of absoute emissions we've seen the same rebound in emissions as others, with 2022 returning more to 'business as usual' after the prior