Next-Gen Gaming Is an Environmental Nightmare

Consumers aren’t going to buy next-gen consoles that are less powerful than their predecessors. It’s a tension that retired Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory energy researcher Evan Mills says is at odds with necessary climate goals. In 2018, Mills gathered 26 gaming systems, including the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Pro, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One, and gauged their wattage with a digital power meter. 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.” Advances 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. Mills says the more impending threat is cloud gaming.

Cloud gaming shuttles input signals from a mobile gamer’s couch to a far-away data center equipped with top-of-the-line CPUs and GPUs, where a new game state is calculated and transmitted back. Because much of the processing happens remotely, so too does the bulk of the energy use. (Some, of course, still happens locally.) In addition to energy-intensive hardware demands, data centers depend on substantial ventilation and air cooling.

“You can think of the data center as a factory: Electricity and water go in, and data and heat go out,” says Aaron Wemhoff, director of Villanova University’s Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems. “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. Microsoft, which runs its own Azure data centers, is pushing hard to convert its facilities to renewable energy. Wemhoff says that while he is seeing more data center operators express interest in moving in that direction, progress has been slow. “Industry members have told me there is little financial incentive to drive this change,” he says.

Cloud gaming isn’t quite mainstream yet; gaming only accounts for 7 percent of global network demand, according to researchers at Lancaster University in England in a 2020 study. And content downloads account for 95 percent of that gaming total. 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. Playing for the Planet is a UN Environment Programme-facilitated alliance comprising top gaming companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Google (but not Nintendo). The organization said in a statement to WIRED that while increasing trends in use, graphics, and energy intensity contribute to higher network loads, cloud gaming is an opportunity to promote renewable energy. “There’s also systemic efforts to be considered, because as large and visible companies commit and invest in renewables at broad scale, low-carbon power becomes more accessible to everyone,” the organization said.