New study finds physical games have 100 times the carbon emissions of digital games

A new study has revealed the carbon footprint of physical video games, and it's no surprise that digital downloads are considered greener than physical games. French carbon accounting firm Greenly studied the environmental impact of various systems and video game production and found that physical copies of games are “100 times more carbon intensive” than digital ones.

Greenlee said that the manufacturing and transportation of physical games (for example, 1 million discs) will produce 312 tons of carbon dioxide, while 1 million downloads of the same game (if the size is 70GB) is equivalent to the emission of 3 tons of carbon dioxide.

Study author Stephanie Safdie explained to us: “While cloud-based gaming may have adverse impacts due to the need for constant access to energy-hungry data servers, we cannot ignore the ongoing impact of manufacturing and packaging physical video games.” Game Industry Network. “Ultimately, downloading digital copies will generate emissions associated with household electricity and associated data center energy use, but it will not have the same impact as the emissions the industry generates in terms of landfill and excessive waste, which are still largely caused by physical consoles and hard drive copies of games.”

Ultimately, the production of physical game discs involves the extraction of rare earth metals and the production of plastics, which in turn requires the use of machinery, processes and labor, resulting in a drain on resources. This includes the manufacturing of gaming consoles, which Greenly estimates consume 3.9 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity and generate 1.6 million tons of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) in the United States each year. Considering TVs also run on electricity, the ultimate impact of traditional consoles, mobile devices and cloud gaming is huge.

So what should environmentally conscious gamers do? Greenly found that handheld systems produce far fewer emissions, such as the Switch, which produces 13.8 kilograms of CO2e per year, and it also recommends that companies look for ways to reduce overall energy consumption.

this is an area Microsoft has been paying close attention to By using recycled materials and Energy saving power mode.