Hey folks, just a quick heads up this week that the SGA is hosting a meetup for game researchers working on or interested in sustainability topics. This Thursday, September 11 @ 11 am CEST / 10 am BST / 7 pm AEST: the SGA is hosting a meetup for games researchers with a| Greening the Games Industry
Greetings, GTG readers – I trust those of you in the northern hemisphere are making the most of the late summer vibes; meanwhile, in Melbourne, spring almost sprung. I know because I was swooped by the world's most aggressive magpie today. Lots more data centre details, some history, some cool AR| Greening the Games Industry
Greetings, GTG readers – it’s Gamescom week, and everyone’s been busy looking at new game announcements, workshops and things like that. We (the SGA) ran a workshop at Devcom that road-tested some of our newest SGA Standard tools and got attendees hands-on with them to try and understand the| Greening the Games Industry
Hello! It seems like everyone but me has been on holiday recently, but I've been head down and working hard – more exciting new updates to the SGA Standard coming very soon, with lots of potential to measure and reduce emissions across the game industry. I've also given myself food poisoning| Greening the Games Industry
One of the questions that has been lurking unarticulated at the back of my mind for a while is the question of who or what is the animating force behind ESG disclosures. I don’t mean in the immediate sense of “who is the author of ESG reports” because that’| Greening the Games Industry
Earlier this year, I set out to answer that question – posed initially by Marina Psaros who was (at the time) working for Unity in SF as their sustainability team lead. Would there be a benefit to putting some sort of sticker or label on game boxes and store pages? Could| Greening the Games Industry
This week, we’ve released a new component of the SGA Standard – covering what the Greenhouse Gas Protocol calls Scope 3.9: Downstream transport and distribution. There are two key features to activities that fall into this category: 1) it has to be an activity that is involved| Greening the Games Industry
Greetings, friends and fellow games sustainability nerds. It's been weeks since I've done a proper post for GTG, and I am feeling the itch. But I'm not quite ready to share more of the work that's kept me so busy and away| Greening the Games Industry
Greetings! We’re back for another look at the key sustainability developments from the games industry and the wider world. But first… The Sustainable Games Alliance invites you to join Ubisoft’s Andrea Carrara, Ad Net Zero’s Anthony Falco, and me for a meetup discussing| Greening the Games Industry
It's been a while since we've had a links post, and the links, they don't stop coming – so let's get stuck in! Lots to share and discuss. Before we get there: here's your final reminder to register for our| Greening the Games Industry
A couple of newsletters ago, I wrote about CDProjektRED's latest ESG report, with its highly detailed and illuminating analysis of the studio's understanding of its exposure to physical climate risks across different time horizons. Long time GTG readers will know that I've been encouraging us to think about games interface| Greening the Games Industry
Research, news and analysis about the environmental impacts of the games industry and what to do about them| Greening the Games Industry
Mobile phones are really incredible devices. They’re some of the most efficient computers that we have, with a decade-plus of engineering that’s gone into making sure they use as little (battery) power as possible, while simultaneous developments in battery technology have also improved how much we can cram| Greening the Games Industry
You don’t have to be a close reader to know that corporate social responsibility in the form of ESG (environmental, social and governance) disclosures has suffered setbacks of late. That might even be putting it too mildly. Since January, the second Trump administration has attacked DEI (diversity, equity and| Greening the Games Industry
Trying to sneak this one out because I've had a lot of this in the backlog and just haven't had a chance to post it yet – [and I was in such a rush I didn't even finish the intro! Nevermind...!] I haven't had a chance to get stuck into the| Greening the Games Industry
Here’s a question for you. When you boot up a game on your console, your PC, or your mobile phone, what is actually happening? I think a basic description might be something like this. A game (like any software) starts with a series of instructions sent to the CPU,| Greening the Games Industry
There was a story in the Guardian earlier this month that caught my eye: “Disney’s Snow White had higher carbon emissions than the latest Fast & Furious film”. This sort of comparison is possible thanks to the publication of GHG disclosures by Disney associated with the production process. But it’| Greening the Games Industry
If you've been following the news around corporate sustainability rules you'll probably be aware that the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) has started to require particularly large companies to undertake an extensive new reporting process this year. The first out of the blocks for the games industry in| Greening the Games Industry
Hello! It's GDC week, so you're probably inundated with news to catch up on – so this one's nice and short. I didn't attend the Game Developers Conference in person this year, however, I did send a video to a fantastic panel called "Teaching Games w/ Games IX: Climate Crisis" on| Greening the Games Industry
Hello, we're back after a skip week. And that's because last week the EU Commission dropped a very late, late breaking proposal to change the rules for a bunch of sustainability legislation – from the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) that sets the scope of companies that must report, and the| Greening the Games Industry
One of the perennial challenges for those of us working on decarbonisation in the games industry has been getting a clear and complete big-picture view of the impacts games have on the planet. Without that, we have had to rely on guesswork and the experience of other industries, which can| Greening the Games Industry
It has been a minute since the last news update – and yet, it's a bit of a short one this time. I'm sure that will change very soon as we're heading into ESG reporting season, so we can expect new data and disclosures any minute now. 2025 will be the| Greening the Games Industry
One of the main reasons the SGA exists is to help make life easier for the European games industry and its reporting obligations under the CSRD. This means understanding and implementing the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). I’ve written about how complex I find this system and how ambivalent| Greening the Games Industry
Welcome back to the first GTG Links of 2025. Lots to catch up on since we haven't done a links post in over a month, so no time to waste. Switch 2 This is a bit of old news now, but worth looking at from the sustainability angle. What do| Greening the Games Industry
Welcome back, I hope you had a great break, ate some yummy food and enjoyed some time off. Unfortunately, the climate never takes a break, and as I write the multiple fires still threatening large parts of Los Angeles are at the forefront of my mind. Sending all my best| Greening the Games Industry
Welcome back. We're in the Washington Post today talking about how, while extremely good, energy efficiency in gaming does not get us to 100% net zero emissions on its own. Maybe that's obvious? Maybe it's not! We also need more more more renewable energy baby, and a bunch of other| Greening the Games Industry
If you follow my work with the Sustainable Games Alliance on LinkedIn (or on our discord – which you should join), you’ll have already seen that we recently announced the completion of a new component of the SGA Scope standard. As a quick refresher, the SGA standard is a set| Greening the Games Industry
Grab your favourite beverage, pull up a chair, and get comfy because we've got almost a whole month's worth of links for you today. Things found amongst the rubble in Lebanon CleanPlay wants to sign gamers up for renewable electricity plans Rich Hillerman and David Helgasson have announced a new| Greening the Games Industry
I’m back, at last. I had a thing planned to write here over the last few weeks, but the main findings were “non-conclusive”, so I haven’t written them up. Instead, I wanted to express some slightly vague ideas and gesture at some big challenges that are constantly on| Greening the Games Industry
It's a long weekend here, so I'm spending it playing Dragons Dogma 2 (picked up in the sale), but perhaps you might be interested in some reading? Here's a few of the choice pieces that I read the past fortnight that might strike your fancy... EA's ESG report EA’s| Greening the Games Industry
I think it’s safe to say that the Western world is experiencing a crisis of public governance. Electoral democracy is no longer representing the ‘demos’, captured instead by lobbyists, a widespread disillusionment at the lack of responsiveness of major parties with their traditional social bases hollowed out, and a| Greening the Games Industry
I am on deadline for a grant app submission this weekend, so this one will be super-mega-rapid fire. I also haven't finished the piece I meant to for last week, so things are starting to pile up. Nevertheless, we press on. Let's check out the trends impacting games + sustainability from| Greening the Games Industry
Though most of the games industry has been focused on Gamescom the past fortnight, with little other news besides, and no new ESG disclosures to share (still waiting on a few of the big ones) this week's links might seem a bit light on. But the rest of the world| Greening the Games Industry
Last year I spent a couple of months’ worth of newsletter entries trying to figure out the greenhouse gas emissions associated with different parts of the games industry, trying out different assumptions and methods. I never managed to arrive at a single “big scary number” that reflected the true global| Greening the Games Industry
This week's post is heavily weighted towards new annual disclosures from games companies, and my annual spreadsheet collecting their numbers is filling up (I'm at about 20 out of an expected 30-ish disclosures now) so we are probably about 2/3rds of the way towards a new 2024 net zero| Greening the Games Industry
For the past 6 weeks, we at the Sustainable Games Alliance have been running fortnightly seminars and workshops on the sustainability challenges and opportunities facing the games industry in Europe and the rest of the world. In this newsletter, I want to give you a little précis of each one,| Greening the Games Industry
This one's a MAMMOTH post – seriously it's like twice as long as the usual links posts, so let's get straight to it. Nintendo's 2023 ESG data Nintendo’s 2023 emissions data has been posted to their website – it’s a bit of a dog's breakfast, and there are several issues| Greening the Games Industry
The SGA Webinar we held the other week was great fun – we had a good crowd and some great questions at the end, and as promised the recording is now online. If you missed it, or you just want to hear me talk about my understanding of the main features| Greening the Games Industry
Been a while, so we have accumulated a ton of exciting, disappointing, and all-around interesting news to share. Our SGA webinar on the impact of EU sustainability legislation yesterday was great, and I'll share the video and slides here when its up for those who couldn't make it. Big changes| Greening the Games Industry
