What does it cost the environment when you download a game? Today, we're publishing our answer. We decided to pool our resources and find the answers we readily couldn't. He'd been alarmed by the IPCC report on climate change and wanted to look more closely at what the games industry was doing to improve. But as I looked around, I couldn't find the information I needed.Īt around the same time, my fellow Eurogamer writer Chris Tapsell came to me with similar thoughts of his own.

'Why don't we know more about this?' I wondered. Somewhere in my mind I knew it had to do with data centres, and I'd heard some pretty bad things about how much power they consumed. There's no packaging waste in the way there once was because I download most of my games, and none of my machines cause noticeable spikes on my electricity smart meter, not like my shower does.īut then there was this niggling thought that perhaps it wasn't as clean as I wanted it to be.

And I looked at gaming and I didn't know. I am worried about the climate emergency and I was looking at my life and thinking about the things I do and the effect they have on our world.

I've never needed to think about it before.Įxcept recently, I began wondering. I know that data gets piped out and sent back, because that's how I download the files to play games, but beyond that, I don't really know what's truly taking place. And when I say behind the TV, I don't mean actually behind the TV, I mean on the internet. I think I've always suspected that something happens behind the TV when I download a game or a patch, or I play online, but I've never seriously stopped to think about what.

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