Yes, gaming pollutes, too. Here's how to make the video game industry better for the planet.
Category
🎮️
GamingTranscript
00:00There are a lot of game developers out there now pushing for a climate-resilient games
00:09industry.
00:10But we're going to get there a whole lot faster with the support of gamers everywhere.
00:17It is an ecological issue to launch a new game console in the same way that it's an
00:24ecological issue to produce anything these days.
00:27In the case of a games console, it's a lot of energy that's used in the manufacturing
00:31process.
00:32It is the minerals that get dug up out of the ground.
00:37And then it's getting built, putting the console together and sending it around the world.
00:58I think the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 that came out in 2006 represented the point
01:03where rendering and processing power was no longer an obstacle to realizing a creative
01:09vision.
01:10And I think a lot of the games that we play today could more or less easily have been
01:14made for those consoles as well, although many of them might be less detailed.
01:20Increasing graphical fidelity at this point is making game development more expensive
01:25and more arduous, not just for artists either, but for all facets of game production.
01:31And it doesn't seem to be making games sell a whole lot better.
01:34So it's an arms race with no winners.
01:56The console itself doesn't actually use that much power.
02:01It's maybe 200 to 250 watts of power, which is nothing.
02:08It's really quite a small amount.
02:10But there are a lot of consoles in the world.
02:12There's all that electricity they use, kind of, you know, it's got to be generated somehow.
02:18And it's not at the moment all renewable.
02:55It's not at the moment all renewable.
03:18Everyone loves to bring up Breath of the Wild as an example of this modern triple-A blockbuster
03:24that everybody loves and that is fully playable on the Switch.
03:28And that's, like, ecologically important because the Switch uses around a tenth of the electricity
03:36compared to other modern consoles of any generation, really.
03:54It immediately or almost immediately, very quickly, makes the previous generation of
04:24consoles obsolete.
04:25Now, there's nothing wrong with those consoles, like, they still work.
04:29But the vast majority of them, we know, they're just going to get thrown out.
04:54Sony's not making any money off of those consoles anymore.
05:08Why would they not make the software, make the hardware, like, open source?
05:13Why not make it usable for other things?
05:17Then we'd be, like, lowering demand for, kind of, new devices.
05:21And that means lower emissions overall.