What does the price of oil mean for games + sustainability?

Ben Abraham

20 Mar 2026 • 11 min read

A photo of Tehran under a thick cloud of oily smoke after oil facilities were attacked.

I had a very productive time in Europe, catching up with my SGA colleagues Maria & Jiri, and also meeting some local Berlin game developers. I got to meet the developers behind one of my favourite games of the last few years – Cold War political simulator Suzerain – and got to talk about my version of the story with them, as well as my appreciation for the depth and nuance of the game’s systemic storytelling. I am very keen to see whatever it is they are cooking up next.

I also got to visit Saftladen, the Berlin indie collective/co-working space, run by the wonderful (and tremendously well-connected) Lorenzo, who seemed to know all the same people I do from the Australian games scene. I marvelled at the deeply similar vibe between Berlin and Melbourne’s indie scenes – it really just felt like being “home” in a lot of ways. Even from a few all-too-brief conversations, I gleaned that people on opposite sides of the globe are grappling with all of the same struggles. Three years on from the great games industry breaking point of 2023, the singular importance of “survival” remains, with rent and the price of groceries still the primary determining costs of indie dev. We talked about how Berlin used to be “cheap” compared to the rest of Germany (so was Melbourne, to some extent). But even though the stakes remain existential, most people I talked to still managed to smile through it. They all seemed to have that slightly mad optimism in the face of pessimistic forces, perhaps the single defining characteristic of whatever resembles an “indie spirit” these days. That and a shrug and a ‘what can you do except keep making games?’ I also talked to several devs about their work and what they need at the moment in terms of sustainability, which almost always circled back around to the question of survival. Time and money are needed to focus on “nice to have” things like energy efficiency and sustainability.

One alternative is to reduce the amount of time that implementing sustainability takes away from development, which is exactly what three members of the new SGA energy efficiency network have recently enabled. First, Hauke Thießen (Deck13 Interactive) made a plugin for Unreal that enables quick and easy “eco modes” that detect inactivity from players, drop the FPS and resolution to reduce energy consumption when players aren’t even playing. Then, Ashe Foltin (Bold Beetle games) made one for the increasingly popular open source game engine Godot, which does similar. And lastly, just this week in fact, Oliver Stock (Walk the Frog UG) made the same for Unity.

There are a few minor differences between them, based on the differences in each platform, but the full documentation and links to each plugin can be found on the SGA Resources page, which also has our huge energy efficiency guide with case studies, best practices, suggestions and other examples, FYI! Don’t sleep on these if you do have the time or the mandate to implement sustainability. We have lots more planned in this space too – this is just the start.

So the other big thing that happened while I was in Europe was the United States and Israel kicked off another idiotic war in the Middle East. As is already becoming clear, the US has basically no way to achieve its strategic goals, whatever they might actually be (or might have been? Regime change seems to be well off the table, as was warned from the start by experts in bombing campaigns). I don’t want to linger on the details of this immoral, idiotic, and illegal war, but I have spent a lot of time the past few weeks trying to come to grips with what it means for the world, and by extension for the games industry.

If, as the earlier discussion suggests, our capacity as an industry to implement sustainability solutions is downstream of economic variables, then the games industry will not be untouched by the incredible supply shock that is unfolding like a slow-motion car crash. I am still trying to build my mental framework for understanding what the effect of high prices for fossil energy will translate into for games, but I want to share some of the things that I have been thinking through to try and make a start.

With the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which as much as 20% of the world’s oil and gas passes, we first saw incredible price rises in spot prices for oil and gas. These have come back down a bit from their initial peaks, but if you listen to analysts that really know the structure of the global oil market – like this Bloomberg Odd Lots interview, which discusses the potential for oil to go over $200 a barrel if the closure continues for long enough – then the current reprieve is likely to be temporary. I have already seen on suggestion that this price would translate to around $9 a gallon for “gas” (petrol, gasoline; whatever you want to call the stuff you put in your car to make it drive). My own best guesstimate of what the equivalent would be here in Australia is about $4 AUD a litre, or almost double current prices. A key conclusion of that Odd Lots episode is that, yes, there will still be oil and gas products to be found in rich/advanced economies, but that it will drive a lot of “demand destruction” in poorer countries – who will simply be unable to access them at all anymore, and will need creative solutions and alternatives. Electrification and e-mobility will be one answer – by 2023 ebikes were already doing more to reduce oil demand than EVs – at least as a replacement for gasoline, but for fertiliser (a lot of which also passes through the Strait and is now locked off from global markets) there are no such substitutes. The consensus seems to be lower crop yields, and higher food prices in many parts of the world. This year is going to be a rocky road, with a lot of pain between here and there. It’s not quite a rerun of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it is quite possibly even worse. If you believe this FT author, the macroeconomic conditions are also worse than the tarrif shock last year:

Is 2026 simply an oilier version of 2025? Might we once again be surprised by the world’s economic resilience and financial market’s frothiness?

No. Today’s shock and war will leave deeper and more lasting scars than last year’s shock and awe. In 2025 inflation pressures were abating and central banks globally were able to ease interest rates to cushion the impact of tariffs on global demand. With energy prices resurgent, that option has been lost: markets are pricing rate rises in the euro area and UK and no immediate easing in the US.

There are some key physical dynamics to fossil fuel infrastructure that come into play as well. Once you ‘switch off’ an oil well, you can’t just easily (or safely) switch it back on again. The nature of oil refining – it gets described as a mega complex high temperature chemistry set in the Bloomberg interview above – is just as hard and expensive to restart once stopped. Both dynamics are likely to push prices higher, for longer, and that’s assuming that peace prevails, and soon. The FT’s Alphaville newsletter also argued this week that “The oil market mess is much worse than you think” – how comforting! The piece ends with the following quote from a JPMorgan analyst:

. . . The apparent stability in Brent and WTI should not be taken as evidence of ample global supply. It reflects a temporary buffer created by regional inventory overhangs, benchmark composition, and policy interventions.

If the Strait does not reopen, this divergence is unlikely to persist: Brent and WTI will ultimately reprice higher as Atlantic basin inventories are drawn down and the global market is forced to clear at a materially tighter supply level.

One temptation we might be seduced by is the conclusion that “high oil prices are good for renewables”, that they help our fight against climate change. As Dominik A. Leusder paraphrases in a piece for Jacobin:

oil is not the victim of geopolitical disruption; it is itself disruptive, a source of persistent political and economic instability. The case for accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels makes itself and should command broad support, both popular and among competing elite factions.

To a limited extent, high fossil prices indeed make renewables more attractive, however, it remains a political choice to actually do something about it. Leusder, again:

Ultimately, viewing the new geo-economic risk as the herald of decarbonization is woefully optimistic. Most countries, including those most affected by energy and commodities disruptions, remain ill-equipped to pursue mitigation at scale. As climate disruption worsens and endangers their capital base and financial stability, their capacity to adapt will diminish further.

As we saw after 2022, Europe (for one) ultimately chose to do very little about weaning itself off Russian gas, and Germany’s politicians are maddeningly still talking about doubling down in the face of the current shock, rather than transitioning away. The high cost of fossil fuels (and consumer subsidies) can also sap public coffers and reduce the availability of investment, as seen in the UK after it was forced to subsidise gas consumption.

There is another sting in the tale in the dependency of renewable tech on the byproducts of oil and gas refining. We are now starting to see a drop in the production of sulphur that comes with lowered fossil fuel exports. As Leusder explains (my emphasis):

Because sulphur must be removed from fossil fuels to prevent acid rain, fossil fuel production accounts for over 80 percent of global sulphur output; 44 percent of globally traded sulphur originates in the Gulf. Sulphur is the main component of sulphuric acid, which is required for extracting from their ores the metals essential to low-carbon energy technologies — nickel, cobalt, copper, zinc, lithium, and uranium.

Jason Wilson reports in the Guardian as well on this weird convolution of war and oil into a potential strategic mineral shortage – in turn driving prices higher for the components of renewables (just as it does for the components for war).

To bring this back around to where we started from – the discussion with Berlin indies about the price of rent and groceries (a perennial concern for Australian indies as well) underscores just how much the shape of possibilities of the games industry is a function of these wider economic factors, like the price of rent and groceries. These become the factors that decide whether indies survive or fold. Trust that the Pentagon will have no trouble accessing the copper and cobalt it needs, no matter what the price ends up being – but what about the manufacturers of next-gen gaming hardware? Or if the price of energy in Taiwan, the world’s chip manufacturing hub, becomes prohibitive for the production of the next generation of chips, what will that do to Microsoft or Sony’s plans for the next generation of consoles? You thought RAMageddon was bad; things can get much, much worse for the resolutely non-essential field of gaming. What does the game industry look like in the context of materials rationing? What gets made, and what doesn't? What gets repaired rather than replaced?

There could be silver linings in this, too – many voices (myself included) have long called for a slowdown in the hardware upgrade cycle, a reprioritising of the use of existing hardware, of living within our technological means. Similarly, higher electricity costs for consumers might also produce greater sensitivity to power consumption – PC gaming at the high end might face some headwinds, with a more transparent cost associated with high-intensity graphics, players might start to look for developers to save them money on their power bills. Especially those who are running the latest graphics cards. CDProjektRED’s climate risk analysis last year identified “reduced interest in energy-intensive games on the part of gamers” as part of a post-2030 scenario of extreme climate impacts and power price increases – we could be getting a dry run for such a scenario early.

High rents, high prices, these are problems for game making everywhere, a function of the global political economy we have allowed to take shape over the last 50 years (coincidentally, since the last major oil crisis). Could we find ourselves in future years looking back on the 2020s as the decade we started to unwind some of these dynamics of deep inequality, or will the contradictions and tensions only deepen? The powerlessness of ordinary consumers in the face of price-setting suppliers is an unpredictable force that will produce new political currents that will be impossible to foresee. I have a vague feeling that the platform rent that companies like Valve, Apple, Google, et al. extract from developers who sell on their platforms will continue to be an unpredictable flashpoint for this.

Leusder’s diagnosis about what to do about all of this is astute, even if it provides little comfort:

The consequences of high inequality and oligopolistic market structures extend well beyond prices and warrant significant political investment: higher taxes, antitrust enforcement, and regulatory changes to market structure. But these are deep structural reforms, the pursuit of which would require sustained mass political mobilization and a fundamental shift in the balance of class power across advanced economies. There are no plausible scenarios in which this occurs any time soon.
…
The most promising scenario, by far, is a moderation of the worst aspects of the new order: war and trade fragmentation. America is the great destabilizing force imperiling the world economy. Together with Israel, it has become a rogue state, unfettered by any consideration of international law, multilateral order, or even hegemonic responsibility. Incapable of dealing with its own domestic dysfunctions, it is wrecking an economic and political system that has so far served it exceptionally well. Its carbon-reliant industries and its defense sector are the only real beneficiaries. As long as these forces remain unchecked, the kind of convulsion we are currently witnessing is here to stay.

It’s for this reason that I’m incredibly encouraged by the actions of the developers of the indie climate game All Will Rise, who this week announced they are handing back the money they were given by Microsoft. They’re doing it as part of the No Games for Genocide movement, and “because of the US tech giant’s ties to Israel’s Defence Force and the technology it has provided during Israel’s war on Gaza, which a United Nations commission last year declared a genocide.”

All Will Rise Narrative designer (and friend of GTG) Meghna Jayanth explains:

“This decision felt to right to us – the game we’re making is about making people feel powerful, and acting, and not giving into cynicism and hopelessness… It wasn’t an easy decision, but it’s worse to live in the feeling of powerlessness. We’re not naive – we know that our action on its own won’t move the needle much. But if enough developers and studios join us in this boycott, we do have the power to pressure Microsoft to end its complicity in Israeli genocide.”

What power do game developers have to pressure the US and Israeli governments to call off this stupid war, and to find a way towards peace? There may not be many avenues, but there will be some.

For the games industry to become sustainable, it needs to be survivable. I am still hoping for peace, but we should also plan for the alternative. If I were in a leadership role in gamedev right now, these are the sorts of questions I would be asking:

– Where are we exposed to fossil fuels? How do we wind back that exposure?

– What is the long-term forecast for renewables in my region? How exposed are we to price increases?

– What are our expectations for target hardware? Do these need revising?

– What efficiencies can we find in our software for our players?

Just some things to consider – thanks for bearing with my protracted absence the past few weeks. It was a very intense time, but also an extremely useful trip, and I'm more excited than ever about the future of the Sustainable Games Alliance. Come join us?

Thanks for reading Greening the Games Industry.