A Sustainable Games Alliance update + invitation to our event next week on what EU sustainability regulation means for the games industry

Hello! It’s been way too long. It’s been a busy, sick, and near-freezing winter here which is quite rare for these parts. The body (and mind) wants to hibernate – nevertheless, we persist.

I have not been idle though, far from it. Despite the gaps in our regular schedule here (I'll be back with another links post shortly), I’ve been meeting with European games companies and working closely with my colleagues in the Sustainable Games Alliance on a bunch of exciting stuff – check out our new website for starters. I think it’s great, and we’ve been getting started on writing a Standard that will guide the games industry on emissions calculations and have been fleshing out the details of the plan for the year(s) ahead. Exciting times!

What is the SGA? It’s a member-based cooperative to help the games industry meet its obligations under the EU’s growing suite of sustainability legislation – from the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) to the sickening complexity of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), to the Green Claims Directive that makes certain green-washy claims straight up illegal. There’s a host of new legislative directives, communications and individual EU member state acts to deal with in the next couple of years. The key takeaway though is that sustainability is fast becoming obligatory for all but the smallest micro-companies, and there will be serious fines associated with non-compliance. If GDPR fines are any indication, we can expect things to start slow and ramp up real fast.

So the SGA exists to specifically avoid this, as the complexity and breadth of what is covered by new EU legislation goes far beyond a simple box-ticking exercise. The SGA thinks that game companies now have every incentive to make games the most sustainable entertainment medium on the planet, but it’s going to take a lot of work and coordination to get there.

So to kick off this process we’re hosting a webinar next week with the SGA’s view on what all this legislation means. It’ll have key takeaways for the games biz, and outline how we think we can make things way easier, faster, and cheaper for the game industry – especially important at this time of uncertainty. I can guarantee you that it will be less expensive and more useful than if everyone paid Deloitte a couple of hundred grand for some slide decks!

We think the games industry deserves an org that speaks its language, understands how it operates, and what it cares about, and can bring together the huge amount of expertise in games & sustainability that already exists, surface it in ways that multiply our impact, and does what is truly required of us in this crucial decade. Many hands make light work, and there’s a lot of work to do.

To get a sense of all the different sustainability requirements in different jurisdictions that we’re tracking, and see when mandatory reporting requirements are coming to your region – have a look at our page with short summaries.

Legislation - Sustainable Games Alliance

An overview of relevant sustainability legislation worldwide affecting the games industry such as the CSRD and the GCD

Sustainable Games Alliance

In the webinar we'll go into way more detail on the European specifics, including the concept of "double materiality" that is causing so much confusion and preview the workshops we already have planned to help games companies actually apply the concept to their particular context, infrastructure, value chain, and business model. We'll also sound a warning over generic "green" claims that now must pass an extremely high threshold for evidence of "superior environmental performance", with prosecution and fines a very real possibility.

So if that sounds like something worth hearing about, the event will be online next Thursday 11th July 2024 – 10AM Central European Summer Time / 6:00 PM Australian Eastern Standard Time.

We are planning on recording the event and hosting it on the SGA website if you can’t make it in person, but it will be better live, as you'll be able to participate in the Q&A afterward.

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: New EU sustainability disclosures: what is required from the games industry?. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

In this webinar, the Sustainable Games Alliance will survey the legislative landscape in Europe, and make sense of the alphabet soup of interlinked EU acts: the CSRD, the CSDDD, the ESRS and the Green Claims Directive. Each separate legislative act imposes new obligations on companies to either disclose sustainability strategy, metrics, risks and impacts (CSRD), ensure that entire supply chains are free from human rights violations and environmental harms (CSDDD), to providing the extremely complex and detailed framework for ESG data disclosures (ESRS), and regulating the types of sustainability claims that companies can make and the evidence required for each (Green Claims Directive). The session is for game business decision-makers, and staff in the industry with sustainability or compliance responsibilities. The session will show how the SGA will simplify members’ compliance with EU legislation, and accelerate action across the games industry.

Zoom

I truly can't wait – working on this has been genuinely thrilling, as the more I improve my understanding of this legislation the more obvious it becomes that the EU is setting up a very robust system, and is taking the challenge of corporate sustainability very seriously. As well they should.

It's not going to be a simple process, but it doesn't have to be a hard one either – and I think it's going to be pretty transformative.

See you at the webinar!