#48 - Greening the video game industry with Ben Abraham and Maria Wagner

Highlights

• 2024-11-15 11:59 Giovanni is a pillar of the small but vibrant gaming sector in Reunion island where I live. He crafts games focusing on the ecological transition. He works either with a small team or by himself. He’s what is called an indie developer.

• 2024-11-15 09:48 Still, most of the buzz is about the gaming industry helping to raise awareness on climate change and ecological transition, almost nothing about its own footprint. This is where Giovanni told me about the Sustainable Gaming alliance and voila.

• 2024-11-15 12:05 At any rate, there was a bit of awareness of things like e waste of, you know, resource consumption and that, you know, vaguely there’s this thing called the cloud that’s probably not great for the environment, but the idea that the games industry globally has a footprint probably the size of a country like Sweden was, was just on no one’s kind of radar

• 2024-11-15 09:56 And I go okay, well what are they probably doing in there? Where do they come from? What are they used for? Are they part of the transistors?

• 2024-11-15 10:03 So as a gamer in my personal life, are there some things that I should specifically focus on to reduce my environmental footprint?

• 2024-11-15 10:04 So how much the device is something that we as gamers should also focus on or how much is it more about energy consumption as you, as you mentioned a bit before, I mean this.

• 2024-11-15 10:07 It’s because production costs of making games has been so high because of this churn of graphics and visual fidelity. That just means you need to throw more and more artists at the problem, more and more 3D modelers, more and more texture and all of this sort of stuff.

• 2024-11-15 10:12 we did our 10 weeks to save the Games Industry tour where we really wanted to interview the leaders of the industry and just find out what is their knowledge level on this topic. So like we interviewed around like 40 industry leaders within 25 cities and found out that they don’t know anything about it. A lot of people think that because games are digital that they are automatically green or that they say okay, compared to other industries we don’t have such a huge footprint so we don’t need to focus on that. Which is of course crazy because we don’t have any data.

• 2024-11-15 10:14 Yeah, so basically before founding the Sustainable Games alliance, like I for my part was leading the Games Forest Club, another ngo, and was helping games companies to donate to forest protection.

• 2024-11-15 11:59 Mary, there is something that I don’t understand. Most of these companies, they are pretty big, they should already report carbon audit. I mean especially if they’re European based or even in some states in the US you’ve got now compulsory carbon reporting following GSG protocol or other protocol in France. So how come that the numbers are not comparable? It’s because these reports are based on the greenhouse gas protocol so far.

• 2024-11-15 12:00 I mean there is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive in Europe which is based on the ESRs. But the problem is it’s not game specific. So basically when you do your reporting, the framework and methodology is so vague, it leaves so much room for you to make decisions and adapt your numbers that in the end you get non comparable results. Because for example, up until now companies could leave out category 11, the use of the product and it’s like in gaming a huge part of their mission. If companies leave this out, the numbers are not comparable.

• 2024-11-15 12:03 Usually there’s like a platform between you and so what that’s meant is that most of the companies have been like, well I didn’t design the Xbox, I didn’t design the PlayStation, so that energy profile is like outside of my control. So I guess they just decide and this is like open to them based on the interpretation of the greenhouse gas protocol that yeah, use of sold products, that’s not my responsibility. It’s actually the console owner’s responsibility. So like Microsoft or Sony’s responsibility. It ends up with this situation where there are large parts of the games industry that are, number one, just not being added up, they’re not being calculated properly.

• 2024-11-15 12:04 They’re made in Unity or they’re made in Unreal. And so there you go, you’re like, okay, well I don’t have control over Unity, I don’t have control over Unreal. Is it really my responsibility to do something about the efficiency of my software or what are the levers that I even have? Right? It’s not, it’s not visible within any of them yet.

• 2024-11-15 12:05 because I’ve done a bit of research and actually there is a search solutions named Godot and that’s a bit insane without any piece of data. I think it’s something like 60 gigabytes of data just to install Unreal. And then you’ve got this other game engine called godot and it’s 160 megabytes. So it’s just insane the difference.

• 2024-11-15 10:23 And what is changing in the industry that could positively impact the reduction of its environmental footprint? I think actually that the industry is getting more mature at the moment because of the like problems it has been through or is still in.

• 2024-11-15 10:26 Doing things to opt out of the hardware upgrade cycle to make devices last longer, I think is the number one thing for a small team to do.

• 2024-11-15 12:06 We, we obviously have massive big vision for it. We want it to be like the kind of plug and play thing, you know, you can just like connect it up to all your existing systems. But at the moment it’s, it’s just a set of methodologies and some spreadsheets that I’ve made to, to kind of, you know, test the methodologies and, and work as a tool for people who maybe don’t have anything to use at the moment. I mean, basically our goal is to help the games companies to comply with csrd.

• 2024-11-15 10:36 And you stay at the same level of civilization and it should be like an immediate drop back to the prehistorical age.

• 2024-11-15 10:36 So what they realized is that there is a lot of waste in games. A lot of wasted energy.

• 2024-11-15 10:37 And I think the result for epic games who make Fortnite was in the order of like megawatt hours of power a day just from this one change.