Next-Gen Gaming Is an Environmental Nightmare

That’s a lot of hardware, and a lot of power.“If people are going to choose to play games, we want to be as efficient as we possibly can in delivering that experience, either via a console or a data center in a streamed environment,” said Microsoft’s vice president of cloud gaming, Kareem Choudhry in a March interview with WIRED. As the dual winds of big console performance and big demand for server-side computing meet, the gaming industry could be setting up for a worst-of-both-worlds situation.“The worst-case scenario is still using relatively energy-intensive hardware on your side and then still using the cloud gaming platforms that have a lot going on the backend in terms of energy demand,” says Cook.It’s no secret that consumer electronics are bad for the environment. Jim Ryan has said that if “just 1 million users enable the feature, it would save equivalent to the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes.” And Hamren says the Xbox Series S and X will have a new, lower-power “connected standby” mode that “ratchets the power way down” when it’s not actively in use.Consumers aren’t going to buy next-gen consoles that are less powerful than their predecessors. With that data, his team authored a groundbreaking report on gaming systems’ carbon emissions, noting that increased performance, more gamers, and more time gaming have “given rise to a perception of unavoidable trade-off between gaming user experience and energy efficiency.” Evolutions in technology—like lowering frames per second per watt—have helped, but “have not translated into reductions in energy use at the macro level.”What surprised Mills wasn’t that PCs and consoles were guzzling refrigerators’ worth of power, though. “While adding IT equipment adds to electricity consumption, the focus on energy efficiency is to minimize the extra electricity required to make up for cooling systems and electrical power losses.”Cloud gaming uses more energy per hour of gameplay than local gaming, which means data centers are taxed regardless of the console people play on. But with Microsoft’s Project xCloud, Amazon’s Luna, Sony’s PlayStation Now, Nvidia’s Geforce Now and other, smaller cloud gaming services pushing console-free gaming, it seems as though this growing trend may have real repercussions on the environment: If even 30 percent of gamers adopt cloud gaming, by 2030 that will mean a 30 percent boost in gaming’s carbon emissions, Polygon reported in a recent story on cloud gaming’s environmental toll.Despite these grim stats, the most prominent group promoting environmentally friendly gaming practices appears optimistic.