In the second part of our series exploring the work of the Playing for the Planet Alliance five years on from its foundation, George Osborn explores the work that the industry has done to practically reduce emissions within the supply chain.
Video games companies have long played an important role in driving innovation in wider society.
Nvidia’s ascent to the second most valuable company in the world is rooted in its history as a producer of graphics processor units for video games PCs; game development engines such as Unity and Unreal have found roles in the real world within fields as diverse as architecture, manufacturing, and motor racing; spatial technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality found mass markets in game before proving adaptable to wider society.
Therefore, the video games industry doesn’t just have an important role to play in reducing its own emissions; it could also spark change across software and hardware businesses which could deliver positive outcomes to people across the world.
Over the past five years, video games companies within the Playing for the Planet Alliance have been taking steps to measure and reduce their carbon emissions.
And in this post, we’ll explore how exactly that has occurred and what it may mean for the wider supply chain beyond games.
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The video games industry is often poorly understood by the wider world, with the complexity of the business, which stretches the development of games, to the manufacture of hardware to the maintenance of systems to support ever present games, unrecognised by the wider world.
As a result, the Alliance has worked in partnership with experts to map how the sector works, understand how it generates emissions and identify gaps in its knowledge base to build an approach to measuring the industry’s carbon footprint.
The major conclusion of this work was that the industry needed dedicated support to measure and reduce its carbon footprint. While it was possible to measure the emissions of a games business, the complex nature of the industry meant that the requirements for doing so varied considerably from business-to-business: encouraging the creation of a dedicated approach for the industry to follow.
In addition to this, it has also sought to understand the importance of tackling climate issues amongst players.
A 2022 survey of nearly 400,000 players conducted via mobile games with the support of Alliance member Playmob sought to understand the impact of environmental content on motivation to play.
It found that 52.9% of players surveyed believed that climate issues were affecting their lives now, that 78.6% believed that games could be used to learn about environmental issues and that 81% of players would be willing to see environmental content in games provided that it fit the narrative of experience.
These findings have given Alliance members confidence to act, both within their businesses - where they feel their specific needs are being met - and in games - where they feel players will respond positively to environmental content.
This has helped to drive action, with the industry benefitting from two forms of activity in particular.
One of the main ways that the Alliance has delivered action on climate matters is through issuing advice to developers with the support of its partners.
First, the Alliance has supported the creation of resources that provide a general overview on how to think about the challenge of addressing climate related issues.
The 2022 Green Games Guide - created by Ukie and Games London in conjunction with Alliance Members - provided a free five step process for businesses to go through to consider what action they can take on their climate journey, practical ways to start that work, and a framework for thinking about more challenging aspects of the climate conversation (such as when, or if, to offset). An upgraded version of this guidance will be shipped in January.
Second, the Alliance has worked to create specific guidance aimed at helping businesses consider specifically what they should do in regards to certain climate issues.
In October 2023, the Alliance, in partnership with The Carbon Trust, delivered a report titled Untangling the Carbon Complexities of the Video Gaming Industry to help companies align their emissions reduction efforts with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. As the title suggests, the question of where emission boundaries stop or start in the industry, and who is responsible for them, wasn’t immediately clear.
With this paper in place, developed in consultation with 10 different players in the gaming ecosystem, it was then possible for the industry to determine clear next steps on how to then reduce emissions collectively.
The development of Playing for the Planet’s Carbon Calculator, informed by the Untangling report, and built by The Carbon Trust alongside input from Playing for the Planet Alliance members, was the natural next step of this journey, and this tool now being beta-tested by studios in the initiative before wider release.
Finally, the Alliance produced a specific guidance about investing in carbon credits, which invited companies to discover the practicalities of putting money into them, consider the principles for doing so effectively, and sharing best practices to do so.
Informed by guidance from The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, this guidance - alongside the rest of the advice produced over the past half decade - demonstrated clearly the value of creating bespoke guidance for the industry.
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Finally, members within the Alliance have shown that practical action is possible at scale within the industry, and that it can deliver benefits to individual businesses, the sector, and the wider world alike.
In a number of cases, games businesses have demonstrated their commitment to reducing their climate impact through their own actions.
65% of members of the Playing for the Planet Alliance have committed to being net zero by 2030. Some members have taken significant practical steps to achieving this goal in regards to the energy usage that underpins their business. Google has already reached its goal of using entirely renewable energy to power its work, with Unity following closely in its footsteps.
However, the industry’s efforts to reach net-zero extend beyond the sources of energy to encompass a range of measures across the industry’s supply chain.
Alliance member SEGA rolled out fully recyclable packaging in February 2020 for its range of physical PC and console releases, while Ubisoft has trialled similar work with the release of Skull & Bones. Members within the company’s wider business have since gone on to advise the packaging group within the Alliance to encourage adoption more widely.
In addition, Sony has been developing an interactive “Climate Station” game that will allow players to understand the impact of a rapidly warming planet on the world, and what individuals can do to address it. More interesting, the game has been tested with policy makers at major COPs and Summits to understand how game–play could increase knowledge and action.
And major platforms have also made substantial changes to the way devices and development work to create a multiplier effect in regards to reducing the impact of developing and playing video games on the environment.
Microsoft has shown how this is possible at both a consumer and commercial level. On the consumer front, the business has rolled out power saving settings on its Xbox Series S and Series X devices that prioritise reducing consumption for all players within its ecosystem - delivering reduction in emissions output at scale in the process.
And on the development side, the business has also rolled out an Xbox Sustainability Toolkit to help developers understand the environmental impact of coding choices on their games; turning the theory of Alliance initiatives like the Green Coding Workshop - where developers sought to come up with ways to make the creation of games more sustainable - into practical action.
Despite these positive steps, the industry remains in the early stages of reducing its carbon emissions. The sector must also be careful that interest in technologies such as generative AI does not lead to increases in energy consumption which reverse the benefits of the work it has done so far.
It has, however, demonstrated that it can create scalable solutions that may be rapidly deployable across the games sector and adjacent technology industries. This means that progress within the Alliance could have a much wider ripple effect within the tech industries - increasing the sector’s ability to act.
