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> Abraham broadly estimates the gaming industry produced between 3 million and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2020 to create video games. That includes en

by vitus 3y ago

> Abraham broadly estimates the gaming industry produced between 3 million and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2020 to create video games. That includes energy bought from local grids and used to keep the lights on and computers powered as developers make games. https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/features/video-games-are-finally-waking-up-to-climate-change/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/features/video-games-are-fi... Compare this to the linked wiki article: > A 2022 non-peer-reviewed commentary published in Joule estimated that bitcoin mining resulted in annual carbon emission of 65 Mt CO2, representing 0.2% of global emissions, which is comparable to the level of emissions of Greece. So, bitcoin mining results in CO2 emissions comparable to twice that of the entire video game and movie industries combined.

mistercheph 3y ago
That's just the energy that goes into making them, what about the energy that goes into playing them? Has to be at least an order of magnitude greater
- vitus 3y ago
  That's a good point, but I'm not sure it's quite as drastic as you think. There are about 400 million current and last-gen consoles that have been sold, all-time. I'd wager most of them spend 95% or more of their time unused. Steam shows about 20-30 million players online at any given point. Let's pretend this represents 50% of the PC gaming population (a vast underestimate of Steam's market share in the US and EU, not sure about other markets like China). What fraction of those are gaming PCs? Gaming laptops? Laptops with integrated graphics that really aren't meant for gaming? Let's say that your typical PC gamer uses 300W when playing video games. That's probably on the low end for a gaming PC, but an overestimate for any laptop. 300W * 24 * 365 * 60 million is about 160 billion kWh. That translates to, um, 33000 tons of CO2? So like 3 orders of magnitude smaller? I'm not even going to bother with the mobile game population because the power draw on those is like single-digit watts so even if there are 100x more players, the numbers are around the same order of magnitude. Even if my estimates of number of PC gamers at any moment and the wattage of the typical device are both off by 10x, that's still way smaller than the estimate of how carbon-intensive it is to make games.

by vitus 3y ago

mistercheph 3y ago

That's just the energy that goes into making them, what about the energy that goes into playing them? Has to be at least an order of magnitude greater

vitus 3y ago
That's a good point, but I'm not sure it's quite as drastic as you think. There are about 400 million current and last-gen consoles that have been sold, all-time. I'd wager most of them spend 95% or more of their time unused. Steam shows about 20-30 million players online at any given point. Let's pretend this represents 50% of the PC gaming population (a vast underestimate of Steam's market share in the US and EU, not sure about other markets like China). What fraction of those are gaming PCs? Gaming laptops? Laptops with integrated graphics that really aren't meant for gaming? Let's say that your typical PC gamer uses 300W when playing video games. That's probably on the low end for a gaming PC, but an overestimate for any laptop. 300W * 24 * 365 * 60 million is about 160 billion kWh. That translates to, um, 33000 tons of CO2? So like 3 orders of magnitude smaller? I'm not even going to bother with the mobile game population because the power draw on those is like single-digit watts so even if there are 100x more players, the numbers are around the same order of magnitude. Even if my estimates of number of PC gamers at any moment and the wattage of the typical device are both off by 10x, that's still way smaller than the estimate of how carbon-intensive it is to make games.