TOKYO, Sept 24 — With the heat turning up on high-tech lifestyles and climate change impacts, Sony and Microsoft are among those promising to reduce energy use and carbon footprint impacts, as a new generation of consoles approaches.
Console manufacturers Sony and Microsoft are involved in the United Nations Environment Programme’s Playing for the Planet alliance and have been among the first to make environmental commitments regarding current and future consoles.
Microsoft is starting up a pilot project — not yet a full or ongoing console cycle production run — to manufacture 825,000 Xbox consoles in accordance with carbon neutral processes.
That brings the limited number of consoles in line with Microsoft’s business operations, the company having instituted a carbon neutral policy in 2012.
It’s also looking to reduce supply chain emissions as a whole by 30 per cent over the next 10 years.
Sony’s PlayStation division, Sony Interactive Entertainment, has said it will carry out a carbon footprint assessment of its gaming services and relay its energy efficiency findings and measures.
A more solid commitment is that the next PlayStation console’s gameplay suspension mode will have a much lower power consumption level than the existing PlayStation 4 — 0.5W, it predicted, a drastic reduction compared to the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X’s current 10W pull, though not quite as impressive as the Nintendo Switch’s 0.1W drain.
Of course, this says nothing about energy use when the new console is in use; the PS4 Pro typically uses between 100W and 150W (the Xbox One X, from 100W to 170W), depending upon the game, with the less powerful Switch running around 15W in-game.
SIE did note that overall power consumption has been lowered over the course of the PlayStation 4’s lifecycle, thanks to technological advances, suggesting that such improvements would carry over to the next PlayStation generation as well.
It’s a critical time for the video gaming sector, with widespread youth-oriented climate movements involving gaming’s target customers.
Successors to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are expected to break cover in 2020 in conjunction with a step-change in focus on accommodating cloud gaming technology.
Speaking of which, with Google Stadia due to launch in November, the tech and data giant said it would produce a Sustainable Game Development Guide and fund research into embedding eco-friendly messages into game play.
Video game publisher and developer Ubisoft, another proponent of cloud gaming technologies, will likewise incorporate green themes and joins Sega’s Football Manager studio Sports Interactive in making its physical manufacturing process more eco-friendly.
The UNEP’s industry group also brings in studios E-Line Media (Never Alone), Strange Loop (the Minecraft-like Eco), and Internet of Elephants (Safari Central), who can offer their expertise in making games with strong environmental themes.
Mobile studio Supercell (Clash of Clans) and Rovio (Angry Birds) are looking to offset the carbon impacts of their communities, while Sybo (Subway Surfer) and Space Ape (Fastlane) went even bigger and said they’d offset 200 per cent of their studio and players’ energy use.
Oddly enough, Nintendo was not among those named as making UNEP commitments, despite the Switch console’s enviable power consumption levels; the company is well known for a relative lack of transparency regarding its manufacturing process. — AFP-Relaxnews
