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

Nov 12, 2024

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3 billion gamers worldwide, billions of devices, terabytes of data streamed, the gaming industry comes with pretty big numbers starting with its $455 billion sales in 2023.

Is its environmental footprint as big? (Not) fun fact, not a single executive in this sector could answer the question.

A new non-profit initiative, the Sustainable Gaming Alliance, is trying to get these numbers right and to equip the industry with the right framework. Its Managing Director, Maria Wagner, and its Research and Standard lead, Dr Benjamin Abraham joined this Green IO episode where great insights were shared on:

👿 The periodic table of torture for gaming device,
🖼️ The Gaming industry dependency on graphics to boost its sales
🕹️ Why “this game is beautiful” should be replaced as a praise by “this game is so enjoyable”
📋 Why GHG protocol is not adapted to the gaming industry
🌋 How to shake up a multi-billions industry in 10 weeks ?
🔄 Why the project mode in the game industry - and elsewhere? - doesn’t help a GreenOps culture to flourish
😴 Energy consumption at idle state

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Ben and Maria's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

Transcript (automatically generated)

Ben (00:00)

the idea that the gaming industry globally has a footprint probably the size of a country like Sweden.

was just on no one's kind of radar. My best guess is that it's somewhere in the tens of millions of tons. The disclosures that I've added up over the last couple of years from the biggest game companies in the world point to a figure somewhere around about 20 to 50 million tons per annum.

Gaël Duez (00:24)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green.io. I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month, on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green.io,

All the references mentioned in this episode as well as the full transcript will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on the website greenayo.tech.

I'm all in mushrooms at the moment. This is how a few months ago Giovanni Celeste started to describe his new game. He kept on. They're incredible and you can tell great stories with them. Of course, to be more mainstream, the first part of my new game is about bees. But I'll do scenes with mushrooms. Giovanni is a pillar of the small but vibrant gaming sector in Réunion 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. Before our discussions, I hadn't realized how diverse and complex the gaming industry was. For me, it was mostly massive studios delivering entertainment to more than three billions of gamers worldwide.

or discussions, reactivated a question I had in the back of my mind for some time. How is the gaming industry doing with its environmental footprint? With massive data transfers, billions of devices sold, and all of the computing power used to develop and run the games, it cannot be negligible. Thomas Bouffis, from the Tales from the Tech newsletter, pointed out to me several signs showing a modest interest in the sector.

Starting with very few C-level offices exclusively in charge of sustainability in the main studios. Sure, here and there some initiatives are emerging such as a petition against developing games in the metaverse, the ongoing work of the French agency ADEME on a referential for sustainable gaming, or what was the active game jam on the energy consumption of video games.

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

This is where Giovanni told me about the Sustainable Gaming Alliance. And voila, I eventually found experts to discuss the gaming industry environmental footprint.

Maria Wagner and Dr Benjamin Abram respectively the SGA Managing Director and SGA Research and Standard Lead kindly agreed to answer my questions about the footprint and more importantly what a tech worker in the game industry sector should do about it. Ben has written an entire book on the topic digital games after climate change based on his PhD work. Maria's personal story could be the scenario for a video game.

Before becoming a seasoned actor in the gaming industry, she worked in diplomacy, intercultural conflict management, as a political observer in Syria, or ran a refugee camp. Wow,

the perfect fit to run a global multi-stackholders initiative to green a 455 billion dollar market.

Gaël Duez (04:00)

So welcome Ben, welcome Maria. It's great to have you on the show today.

Ben (04:06)

Thanks, Gael. It's great to be here.

Maria Wagner (04:06)

Thanks for having us.

Gaël Duez (04:09)

You're welcome. Just to understand a bit the context before deep diving into the environmental footprint of the gaming industry and the many, many, different topics that I'd like to cover with you. What make

Gaël Duez (04:24)

The gaming industry is so specific within the tech industry. And how come that we usually don't incorporate in the big green software, green IT, sustainable IT, you name it, momentum, which is happening around the world, what is related to the gaming industry itself. And as I said in my introduction, the gaming industry is pretty big, both in terms of a number of gamers, employees and workers.

So I guess in terms of footprint as well. Maria, you're a very knowledgeable person of this industry. Could you maybe try to give us an answer?

Maria Wagner (05:00)

Yeah, I think the games industry is very special when it comes to the connection to the people and of course also the reach, right? As you have said, we are reaching basically half of the globe and this is something which a lot of people forget that we are the medium of

the times. So compared to movies and films or the TV, there is no other medium which reaches so many people and I think this makes us really special.

Gaël Duez (05:33)

It's a question of reach according to you more than the technical setup behind it.

Maria Wagner (05:38)

The technical setup behind it, of course, as well, I would say it's way more complicated because it connects so many different parts when it comes to games. There are so many parts which need to come together to make a game happen and this is maybe something also Ben can cover perfectly because he looks into the value chain.

Ben (05:55)

The thing that separates the game industry from just general software and tech to my mind is that it is a software industry, but it's also an art form. It's an art industry. it's both artistic practitioners who work with digital tools. So there's like 3D artists, there's also coders, there's also community managers. There's a really strong emphasis on engagement with the end users.

Games companies are very aware of what their users are interested in and care about. And so it is just a software company. Games are just a software development exercise, but they are also an artistic exercise as well. There's a creative dimension to it.

Gaël Duez (06:47)

Which makes them pretty specific, I would say, because I've never heard about a piece of SAP reporting being branded as arty.

What about its environmental footprint? We're talking about billions of users. We're talking about hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. So I guess it's pretty big. I couldn't really see any global report on

the environment and footprint of the gaming industry. So maybe that's an issue that we should discuss a bit later in the episode. But what are the numbers or the order of magnitude that you could share with us to grasp how much is the gaming industry impacting the planet?

Ben (07:29)

So in terms of orders of magnitude, I think that's the right question to ask because we really only have a rough sense. It is in the tens of millions, almost certainly. Is it less than a hundred million? Possibly. When I started the research work that became the book that I wrote, Digital Games After Climate Change, there was

hardly any kind of research out there. I couldn't find anyone who was even really thinking about what the impact globally of the games industry was in terms of emissions at any rate. There was a bit of awareness of things like e-waste, resource consumption, that, know, vaguely there's this thing called the cloud that's probably not great for the environment. But the idea that the gaming industry globally has a footprint probably the size of a country like Sweden.

was, was just on no one's kind of radar. and so My best guess is that it's somewhere in the tens of millions of tons. The disclosures that I've added up over the last couple of years from the biggest game companies in the world point to a figure somewhere around about 20 to 50 million tons per annum. And that's just, just playing games. That's players that's.

infrastructure, making the games themselves, offices, it's everything. the complexity of it really does sprawl.

Gaël Duez (08:54)

And Ben, you're mentioning to greenhouse gas emissions when you mentioned talking about millions. That was the main focus of your study in terms of environmental impact. Am I right here?

Ben (09:05)

It was, yeah. So I, I tried to break down the production process into different phases and looked at what is involved in each phase. So developing games, it's a lot of power in offices, it's IT purchases, new equipment. distributing games involves data centers, the digital distribution networks of steam, the Apple store, the Google play store, you know, all these devices that are getting games downloaded to them.

And then the end users themselves and the devices that they play games on, whether that's a games console or a PC or a smartphone. And each one of them has vastly different levers of decarbonization potential and vastly different levels of transparency even in terms of what we know about each phase.

Gaël Duez (09:56)

And did you manage to calculate also the embedded carbon or was it only carbon emitted by the energy consumption or also

the carbon emitted during the manufacturing and extraction phase, so through the entire life cycle of all the devices.

Ben (10:14)

So I did also look at embodied carbon and I also actually looked at a little bit of the other non-climate environmental impacts, so things from like mining rare earth materials and things like that. So actually in my book, there's a really interesting table, like I call it the periodic table of torture, where I go through a list of elements that were detected via this advanced ICPMS method.

of analyzing what are the atomic elements inside a PS4 chip. 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? Are they part of some other part of the lithography process? Yeah. And so when it comes to games consoles, at least, companies like Microsoft and Sony have gotten a bit better over the years at disclosing what the embodied carbon is in those.

consoles. So we know a little bit about them, but PCs, because there's so many device manufacturers, there's so many different hardware components. Yeah, again, that's just this big question mark unknown area.

Gaël Duez (11:18)

That's interesting because you mentioned embedded carbon, so everything related to greenhouse gas emissions, but you also touched upon the material footprint, which is how much we need to extract to get one piece of console or chip to be manufactured.

When I facilitate digital collage workshop, that's a figure we use a lot, which is basically for two, 300 grams smartphones, we need to extract around 70 kilos of resources. this ecological backpack is pretty big. Do you know if this is this same order of magnitude for a console or

Can it be a bit smaller?

Ben (12:00)

It's a really hard question to answer. My suspicions are that they're about the same.

I don't have any hard numbers exactly, so my study was done on the smell of an oily rag. I had no money to do it and my research lab couldn't actually tell me the exact quantities that are in them. it's a good guess that most games consoles are probably equivalent to like a smartphone.

Okay, well, that's pretty big. It's a ratio in terms of hundreds times more than the actual weight of the device. pretty good. Maria, are there other environmental impacts that the gaming industry is starting to get aware of?

Maria Wagner (12:37)

At the moment we are in the phase of raising awareness in general when it comes to the footprint of the value chain and really producing games because I think there is a big focus when it comes to the reach and what people can communicate through their games. when it comes to

getting their own house in order and looking at the value chain and decarbonizing the value chain itself. There we still have a long way to go.

Gaël Duez (13:09)

I think I'm going to hire you to explain to everyone why this podcast is about cleaning our hand house rather than doing green tech or tech saving the world, etc. That's exactly the approach I've got. Okay, so before deep diving into the industry and more specifically a tech worker in the gaming industry can do, I've got one question

So as a gamer in my personal life, are there some things that I should specifically focus on to reduce my environmental footprint? Maybe Maria, do you have some idea?

Maria Wagner (13:46)

you can look at your electricity grid. So where do you get your electricity from is a huge factor. And of course, you also have to ask yourself if you always have to have the newest hardware, which is out there, or if it's possible to play your favorite game, maybe on like an older device.

Yeah, so I think this is something what players can do for sure. And of course, being more vocal about it. Ask your favorite game studios about their footprint and responsibility and the same goes, of course, also for the hardware.

Gaël Duez (14:24)

Regarding the devices, what is the churn rate? Smartphones used to be crazy. the average use span of a smartphone used to be a year and a half. So people were literally dropping perfectly functionable devices to get the newest one. It gets a bit better since a few years. I think it's a bit above two years, which is completely insane.

And you think about all the energy and materials and resources put into this incredibly sophisticated device. anyway, I've heard that the gaming industry, the console, people tend to use them a bit longer. 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 mentioned a bit before?

Ben (14:48)

It's still so short, yeah.

Maria Wagner (15:16)

I mean, this is a question or this is a topic we actually discussed, I think, just like last week. So, of course, it takes up a lot of resources to produce new hardware. So I think we should in general question our culture of...

having software which always needs new devices, know, so basically adapting the software in a way that we can still use the old devices and it still would run perfectly. So it's hard to say because of course if we would use hardware way longer then it would be more an energy question and optimizing

the software to use less energy. But as long as we keep pushing the boundaries and need always new hardware, this is still a big question.

Ben (16:15)

Maybe I'll just add a little bit extra context or a little bit extra color there then. The games industry has been basically since the 1980s, it's relied on selling games or marketing games via a kind of approach that

that sells based on graphics, right? Like this, it's slowed down a little bit in the last five to 10 years, but for the longest time it was like, you know, it went from eight bit graphics to 16 bit to 32, and then you get polygon counts, resolutions, frame rates. And so that's been kind of embedded in the games industry for a really, really long time now. The expectation is we're going to sell games by saying, ooh, this year's model is better.

There's more polygons or it's, you know, it goes up to 200 frames per second or it's more responsive or it's got this new engine or that new feature. And that drives the hardware upgrade cycle. So even though console generations, so if we're just talking about console gaming last for somewhere between six, seven, maybe eight years at the very most in terms of like, you know, a new one comes along and it's upgraded and better.

Usually what ends up happening is we get these mid cycle refreshes where you know get the ps4 pro or the ps5 pro or you know these upgraded ones Yeah, so basically the games industry has been locked into the hardware upgrade cycle for a really really long time And we're really really reaching the limit of that in in the last year or so The games industry has been through a real shake-up. It's been through a real crisis

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. And that's to sell more consoles, to sell more games. And that's part of this unsustainable trajectory that we really need to rein in.

Gaël Duez (18:21)

And you know, Ben, it super interesting because I remember that when I used to magazine, yes, paper magazine on games, the best way to praise a game was, is beautiful. It is an interesting choice of word. Like, it is a beautiful game. And it was,

As you say, a lot based on graphic and not necessarily how enjoyable it was to play with this game. we could have expected a journalist wanting to praise a game saying, it's incredibly gameable or enjoyable to play with, or it got many twists or you get completely hooked by the story.

That's true that most of the time it's all about how beautiful, how well crafted, how pixel perfect the game is. I think it has started to change a bit in the industry. it was really something that struck my mind when you mentioned it, this vicious cycle of always more hardware. to wrap up what you both said for a gamer, it's really about...

questioning the need for the latest shiny stuff and considering keeping the hardware longer and make sure that the electricity grid is as decarbonized as possible, especially, I guess, if the person plays a lot via streaming solutions. Am I right to summarize it that way?

Maria Wagner (19:47)

I maybe would also just add there are so many beautiful games out there which don't have like the craziest newest like graphic and the craziest needs when it comes to hardware and this is something which we need to cherish and I think it's just like as you said before a marketing question that

especially like the big corporations is on the shiniest versions and like the games which need a lot of resources but there are also games out there which are completely the opposite and are beautiful as well.

Ben (20:25)

Just to add on to that as well, I think one of the things that I want to emphasize too is that this is what we know at the moment, right? So the ability for consumers to actually affect their end emissions when they're playing games is actually quite limited, right? A lot of the power is in the choices that have already been made by people upstream, by big corporations, by big companies.

will be things that consumers can do. And that's sort of what I think needs to kind of happen. And what we're hoping to do with the SGA actually is to get the whole of the industry, consumers, producers, fans, know, even people who hate the games industry, all to be on the same page about, where do the biggest interventions need to happen? Where do we get the most bang for our buck?

Gaël Duez (21:19)

Ben, what a wonderful transition. Let's talk about the gaming industry itself.

So maybe it's time to talk a bit of, first of all, as a worker in the IT industry, sorry, in the gaming industry.

How much am I exposed to the fact that I'm also part of the problem and I emit greenhouse gases and I consume a lot of non-renewable resources, et cetera, et cetera? What is the level of awareness in the gaming industry at the moment?

Maria Wagner (21:49)

Yeah, I mean, this is exactly the question which, like one of the other co-founders, Jiri Kupjainen and I was asking ourselves when 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...

Maria Wagner (22:14)

like we interviewed around like 40 industry leaders within 25 cities and found out that they don't know anything about it. most of the people,

Maria Wagner (22:30)

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.

Gaël Duez (22:51)

The level of awareness seems to be very, very low, even compared to other subparts of the IT industry. mean, usually, the, it's in the cloud, so it doesn't pollute anymore.

It's something a bit of the past now in the IT industry. That was something that you could hear maybe five years ago, but not that much today.

Gaël Duez (23:10)

So you mentioned the Sustainable Gaming Alliance and I guess you created the SGA as a reaction when you realized with Yuri and other people that the level of awareness was super low. Could you tell us a bit more about this organization? Why you created it and how is it helping to contribute today to a greener, if I may use the word, gaming industry?

Maria Wagner (23:33)

Yeah, basically, before founding the Sustainable Games Alliance, I for my part was leading the Games Forest Club, another NGO, was helping games companies to donate to forest protection. And there I realized very fast that a lot of companies use

the forest protection or planting trees as a way to, you know, think of themselves that they're done their part and being green. But the problem is, of course, that they never looked at themselves and at the value chain. So they did not understand that they need to decarbonize and need to, yeah, really basically change the way they're doing business.

to be sustainable. So in the conversations which we were having together with Jiri, found out that we need numbers. We basically need numbers to be able to address this topic. there are no comparable numbers at the moment. At the moment, every company can just like...

publish and say whatever they basically want, what their current footprint is. And this is something we want to address because like only with comparable numbers, we will be able to talk about best practices and how to optimize and yeah, more efficiently reduce the footprint and decarbonize the industry.

Gaël Duez (25:02)

Maria, there is something that I don't understand. Most of these companies, they are pretty big. they already, they should already report carbon audit. 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?

Maria Wagner (25:08)

Yeah. It's because these reports are based on the greenhouse gas protocol so far. 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. 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 the mission.

Maria Wagner (26:15)

If companies leave this out, the numbers are not comparable.

Ben (26:18)

Yeah. The reason I think that a lot of that happens is that again, because games like they like the games industry relies on these larger tech platforms. Like there's not a lot of direct to consumer sales of games, right? It all goes through the steam or the app store or that's about it. Really. There's no buying a game directly from the producer. 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 for sold products. That's not my responsibility. It's actually the console owners responsibility. like Microsoft's 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. And then number two, we have no plan for how to reduce them. No real actionable strategy for how to get to net zero in the games industry.

Gaël Duez (27:26)

There is no in the SBTi framework any specific guidelines for the gaming industry. Not at all.

Ben (27:37)

I don't believe so, no.

Gaël Duez (27:38)

And could you share another example? Is there any discrepancies or way of calculating that creates so incomparable reports?

Ben (27:52)

well, I think a lot of it just comes down to it not being a practice for lots of games companies, right? yes, it is quite surprising that a lot of the big companies aren't disclosing, that is changing over time, but, quite a lot of the biggest game companies, if you think about like Nintendo, based in Japan, Japan doesn't yet have a mandatory,

reporting standards. Nintendo actually does disclose quite a bit, but there are lots of other Japanese games companies, South Korean games companies, North American games companies as well that it's just not, hasn't been on their radar. No one, guess, has really asked them to do this reporting yet.

Maria Wagner (28:32)

Maybe one more thing is, so the problem is there are so many different components within the value chain. I think this is something which is really special that the greenhouse gas protocol does not provide the boundaries between the different service providers. So we have, for example, ads, right? Like if you have a mobile game and it's free to play and you have all the ads.

which are played during the gameplay. There is no clear definition of who is responsible for the emissions of this ad which are played during your game. And this is just like one example of how many different companies are involved within the value chain. And because the boundaries are so unclear, you have completely incomparable numbers

Ben (29:25)

And the same goes too for game engine makers. most modern games are made on a software platform. They're made in Unity or they're made in Unreal. And so there you go. You're like, OK, 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? It's not visible within any of them yet.

you know, what you're actually asking of your end user and their energy consumption, you know, and this could be millions of people that you're potentially selling and playing your game.

Gaël Duez (30:02)

That's a beautiful example, Ben, because I've done a bit of research and actually there is a third solution named Godot. And that's a bit insane without any piece of data, I think it's something 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.

So it seems that for a developer working in the game industry or a small studio, there are some leeway

Or am I completely misunderstanding the issue here, Ben?

Ben (30:45)

No, I think that's right.

It's hard to know exactly because it's just never been part of the culture to really think about the performance. I mean, it has been for specific platforms. Like you need to hit your target. You know, maybe the new call of duty will have a frames per second target of 60 frames per second on, you know, this specific kind of hardware thing. And so they will always like push the limit right up to their, you know, squeezing as many pixels and stuff as you can.

But yeah, there are absolutely alternatives that use less space, less power, less like resource intensive, less taxing on the player's device. And, you know, if you just take a different artistic approach, you take a game development methodology, basically, you you develop something smaller, you're not making a big blockbuster here. If you're an indie developer and you're working in a small team,

You don't need all the features of Unreal. You're not going to need them all.

Maria Wagner (31:44)

I I think this is also like the exciting part of our work that because it's so new to the industry, there are so many low hanging fruits and potential because like people just have not looked into this topic much. And yeah, that's the exciting part about it.

Gaël Duez (32:02)

How easy do you believe the change in mindset will be?

Ben (32:05)

I mean, it's partly mindset, but it's also partly the business model that the games industry has used and relied on to sell games. that approach to marketing the game as being the newest, biggest, brashest, most advanced game and

you know, selling a new game every couple of years, right? And you're, moving on to the next project, you know, as soon as your game is out, at least until fairly recently when with the advent of games as a service, a lot of the games, you know, they would just get shipped and then you start the next project immediately. So there's nothing really to optimize or there's no chance even to, to optimize in the development cycle for saving money in the servers, unless you are running a game like Fortnite or something with big servers. And then, yeah, that's, think where it's probably starting to happen.

Gaël Duez (32:59)

And where things are starting to move, because you mentioned several times the business models, but we talk more and more about streaming game. We can also see that some, maybe a fraction, I don't know how big it is, but of the gaming industry is focusing or refocusing on the narrative, the beauty of the story and the beauty of the gameplay rather than the beauty of the game itself. So.

Are these trends potent or are they still marginal? And what is changing in the industry that could positively impact the reduction of its environmental footprint?

Maria Wagner (33:36)

I think actually that the industry is getting more mature at the moment because of the problems it has been through or is still in. I think before the eyes were also not on the industry that much. So there has been this discussion within the industry, are games political?

or not, you know, do we have a responsibility as game developers to be political? And I think it also goes into do we have a responsibility to decarbonize or is this up for our service providers and the politicians to deal with that topic? And I think at the moment there is a change that the industry is getting more more mature and is ready to take on more responsibility.

Just because we have on the one hand the regulation and also politics are getting more and more interested in games and what is going on on the platforms. yeah, I think also the society is now a little bit more aware that that the games industry is a huge industry. And before...

they were able to just be something on the side and be not heard of.

Gaël Duez (34:55)

It's the number one media today, maybe with video streaming, but I'm not even sure. think video gaming is bigger than video streaming. And just to bounce back on what you've said, I've never heard about a single cultural product which is not political per se. By not willing to be political, it is political, it means that it's just conservative. And I guess if you look at the story of Call of Duty,

Gaël Duez (35:22)

It's just a living recruitment ad for the US Army and it has been copycat by almost all the armies around the world for recruiting purpose. So it is very political what you put in the game.

So let's play a game, pun intended. Let's say that we are a team of a small indie studio, because big, big cooperation, it's a different story. And we are, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 people in the room. And we are brainstorming And we're saying, OK, what are the top three things

that we should consider changing or we should consider start doing to truly make our games sustainable.

According to you, would be the three things that a small indie studio should consider?

Ben (36:16)

certainly I think the top one is to support older hardware because that's the big challenge, right? A lot of the games industry, we have the solutions, we just need to kind of implement them so we can buy renewable electricity and we can run our servers on renewable electricity.

do digital downloads renewably as well, but when it comes to hardware, that's just always going to have a huge emissions and huge other environmental footprint attached. 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.

Maria Wagner (36:57)

I actually would agree when it comes to that and my number two would be get in touch with other studios who are already working on the topic because like I still think that at the moment the industry is barely connected when it comes to sustainability and games and there are a lot of great examples out there.

And of course, yeah, like talk to us because we can provide you with the tools to measure your impact.

Gaël Duez (37:32)

you mentioned several times the framework or actually the tools that the SDA can provide to anyone in the gaming industry to help get better measurement or calculation. you want to say something about it.

Ben (37:49)

Thanks Gael. at the SGA our main mission is to produce a methodological standard for how we measure, how we collect the data and how we calculate the end greenhouse gas burden of making games, of playing games, of selling, distributing games, the whole value chain.

we're working on this standard and it's going to be an open source standard. It's going to be open to anyone to use and apply. And we want as much input as possible. Like we're already consulting with lots of games companies. The goal of it really is to just save everyone a whole bunch of time, right?

Gaël Duez (38:28)

And is it more a tool or a or a framework? Is it like plug and play? That's my first question. You know, you've just dropped numbers from, I don't know, your accounting system or wherever you need those numbers from. Or is it more something that you get your own people trained to understand how to apply this methodology into your company?

Gaël Duez (38:53)

That will be my question number one and my question number two, because it might be a bit related, is how connected is this work that you're doing with the GHG protocol or other, I would say, meta protocol or meta way of measuring the footprint?

Ben (39:09)

So it is a little hard to describe because it is a work in progress. We obviously have massive big vision for it. We want it to be like the kind of plug and play thing. You can just like connect it up to all your existing systems. But at the moment, it's just a set of methodologies and some spreadsheets that I've made to kind of test the methodologies and.

and work as a tool for people who maybe don't have anything to use at the moment.

Maria Wagner (39:36)

I mean, basically, our goal is to help the games companies to comply with CSRD. So the methodology sits on the baseline of the greenhouse gas protocol and the ESRS. So it is basically helping the games companies to understand all this blurry lines.

which the greenhouse gas protocol leaves open at the moment. So what we are doing with this at the moment spreadsheets and supportive numbers is that we reduce the time and efforts of the companies to doing the research themselves and also to be alone making this decision, decisions which are going into the reporting.

For example, what is material for my studio? This is something which you cannot put into a spreadsheet or a calculation. This is something which you need to decide case by case. And what we are doing is we helping the industry to have this conversations and decide basically what is material and what is not. So they're not alone.

At the moment, this legislation is still a moving target. So it would be stupid to now develop like a tool, right? Because it would be outdated in two months. So it's kind of a moving target. And we are offering a community with experts discussing all these topics. like this poor...

reporting sustainability managers are not alone having to make these decisions, but that they can basically connect with each other, exchange knowledge, and in that sense, save themselves time and share best practices.

Gaël Duez (41:30)

So I've got a better understanding of what is currently offered by the sustainable gaming aliens and the big vision I would say. So thanks a lot both of you. I think we have some sort of an action plan now with the brainstorming exercise plus the explanations you provided with the SGA methodology.

Maria Wagner (41:53)

And when it comes to the story, I...wanted to add on that a little bit. Of course, it always depends on what kind of game you're developing. But sometimes the stories within games are very focused on extraction of goods. I think game developers should just like, but I think most of the game developers do, just be more aware of what kind of story

do you convey to your players? Does it always have to be gather everything and throw it away afterwards? Does it need to be this extraction? Because there are already more and more games which are keeping that in mind, that there is always a cost to extraction. But this is something which is quite new, I would say.

Gaël Duez (42:47)

Yeah, we should create an extension to Age of Empire, where actually when you ran out of mine, you know, and especially gold or whatever, it's not like stable because it happens, you know, I was always very shocked when I used to play with this game that, okay, it's over. You know, we collected everything on the map and it's over and you stay at the same level of civilization and it should be like an immediate drop back to...

prehistorical age, like you don't have the gold to pay whatever the resources are. Boom, end of game, end of civilization. But I got your point that the philosophy of being a bit more aware of how our biosphere works and that it's not just extract, extract and strike and then the game is over because actually in the real world, we don't want the game to be over.

Gaël Duez (43:39)

Ben, you want to add another action?

Ben (43:42)

It's probably a little bit less relevant for small indie studios, but it's still something they can do. it's actually something that the Microsoft Xbox sustainability team pioneered. So what they realized is that there is a lot of waste in games, a lot of wasted energy. When players are sitting on a menu screen because they're in between rounds or they've gone off to make a

cup of tea or get some food or whatever. You don't need to be pushing all those pixels on a idle state, right? So, and they worked with a couple of different studios, big studios, small studios. And they realized that, yeah, if you just shave a few frames per second off the menu screen and you lower the resolution,

you can save a substantial amount of power from that device while it's in that state. And I think the result for Epic Games who make Fortnite was in the order of megawatt hours of power a day, just from this one change. So if you've got a really big audience, you can make a big impact.

And that's pretty amazing because it's user aware electricity consumption. Like if no one is actually using the game, no need to consume crazy amount of energy if I follow you right here. But could we envision a word when we move a step forward with carbon aware? Like if I know that my electricity grid is highly carbonized at the moment because of the time of the day or because where I am, I will...

offer my user to maybe play with a lower quality or resolution being a bit degraded Or is it something that at least at the R &D stage, like not being rolled out already, is something considered on it's a bit of a taboo, like all the time best services ever should be delivered to our user?

Ben (45:38)

I think it's possible. It's definitely achievable. I think the barriers there are actually just cultural. is like, we've always got to have the most powerful, most beautiful image. And we are starting to see attitudes in gamers change. A bit of research done in 2021, think, asked gamers, a thousand gamers in the US, like

Ben (46:04)

a whole bunch of climate and sustainability related questions. And even then, a majority of them said, yeah, the games industry has a responsibility to reduce its emissions. So I think players are starting to be aware of this. it's up, it's at the point where we just need to connect those desires with the solutions that developers already have.

Maria Wagner (46:26)

I'm just thinking, it wasn't the eco mode version, like the Fortnite event, what they did. I mean, it was playing with reduced frame rate, as far as I know, but there was no study done how the players received it, right?

Yeah, I'm not aware of, I can't remember what was in the white paper. They have a published white paper that you can go look at and see. But I think the goal mainly there was to be as unobtrusive as possible. It's really not a thing yet in the games industry to connect with those gamers that do have those green impulses and make use of them.

Maria Wagner (47:12)

Also, sorry to add on that, I definitely think that there is the potential and for like an indie game studio, in that sense, I would say the number one thing would be to get together with others and put pressure on the big service providers, the platforms, or not pressure, but like working with them together to decarbonize the whole industry.

Because I think if we see the big picture and we have comparable numbers, it will be way easier to decarbonize as a whole industry than one studio doing little tweaks.

Gaël Duez (47:51)

Before closing the podcast, know that you've already shared some resources, but is there any other resources on top of the SGA and your book, Ben, that you'd like to share that could be very, very useful for a tech worker in the gaming industry?

Maria Wagner (48:07)

I think at the moment we are also shooting a bunch of different interviews with industry experts. And I think it's actually interesting to hear what is happening there. So this is definitely something I encourage people to look into because we are interviewing the different sustainability managers with their challenges and solutions within the industry.

we are really coming from the industry and the solutions we design are for the game developers, like really for people working at the games and which will be applicable. like Yirik Kupyainen, who is one of the founders and had won the ideas, is an engineer himself. He had a bunch of like

Maria Wagner (48:55)

companies within the industry. also, Petri Jerviletto is one of the co-founders of Remedy, who is backing us. And of course, also David Helgeson, the founder of Unity. So we are backed by industry experts.

Gaël Duez (49:15)

So thanks a lot for these extra resources and extra explanations on what you're trying to achieve with the SGA. Now, traditionally, and this time I will make no exception, I love to close the podcast with a positive note. So I would like to ask both of you, what is the positive piece of news that you would like to share regarding sustainability and maybe even sustainability in the gaming industry?

Ben (49:41)

well, yeah, so I was really encouraged by the recent publication in, think it was a nature journal, looking at the effect of what, I guess what we might consider the more extreme climate protesters was on public sentiment. I think they ran a study on the public public opinion after like before and after the just up oil intervention that I think threw some soup on the, on one of those artistic works.

And the result was actually that rather than like harming the cause or anything actually it the support for more moderate climate sustainability action rose after those sort of extreme interventions. So I thought that was really encouraging. It just made me want to like go out and do the Andreas Malm thing and blow up a pipeline.

Maria Wagner (50:31)

Yeah, I think it's very encouraging to see that more more companies are reporting on their scope three emissions because of course on the one hand they have to anyway because of the European regulations but it's encouraging to see that also a lot of companies doing that like out of free will.

and that we get more and more data within the market. And because of that, it is also more and more clear that we need to have more refined methodologies and that we are basically all connected because I think many times we think we can sweep over the responsibility to someone else. But when it comes to solving climate change or decarbonizing the industry,

It's really about working together. yeah, think, yeah, seeing more and more companies disclosing their scope three emissions is something which will help to recognize that.

Gaël Duez (51:34)

So transparency in working together. I think that could be the tagline of this episode.

Maria Wagner (51:39)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, actually, yeah.

Gaël Duez (51:42)

So thanks a lot both of you for joining the show. I think I will very carefully consider which kind of device I will buy to put under the Christmas tree.

As I said in the introduction, that's a sector I absolutely have no clue on how it works. So I learnt a lot thanks to both of you. once again, it was great to have you on the show and I hope that we will keep on having a very interesting discussion.

Ben (52:07)

Thanks, Gael. It's great.

Maria Wagner (52:08)

Thank you, thank you,

Gaël Duez (52:11)

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