Sustainability in the gaming industry: three case studies

According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the video game industry has yearly revenues of $140 billion. In 2017, 666 million people watched other people play games on YouTube and Twitch. According to this UNEP report, channeling even a small portion of that attention and the industry’s revenues towards the planet would greatly impact the real world. With the help of data and Google Cloud solutions, many industry actors are attempting to tackle these challenges. The case studies below will set out the measures that BetaDwarf, FACEIT, and Lush have taken on this journey. 

Hosting services are a big part of the climate impact for game companies that run games-as-a-service. When BetaDwarf searched for a hosting service for their new game Minion Master, they added 'climate-friendly' to their priority list.

As Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offsets 100% of its energy consumption, BetaDwarf found GCP to be the most climate-friendly hosting service as a result of their concrete competitive evaluation against the other major cloud providers. Changing to GCP would result in BetaDwarf reducing its climate impact from hosting to near zero. The game was moved from its previous hosting service to Google Cloud in a matter of weeks.

Online gaming is one of the fastest-growing sectors of social media. This increase in use also generates an increase in the toxicity of gaming chats. FACEIT is the leading competitive gaming platform for online multiplayer gamers that addresses toxicity at scale for popular competitive games.

Previously, incidents from users were given an index depending on the context of the reported incident. If that index fell below a certain threshold, FACEIT’s system would trigger an appropriate response, which could be a twelve-hour ban, a warning, or a similar consequence. Players who received a consequence could ask for their case to be reviewed by a moderator team to understand when and why the system was triggered.

As the report handling was manual and time-consuming, the delay between violations and feedback also decreased transparency in communication with gamers, FACEIT says. The platform has created Perspective API, a Google Cloud technology, to allow gamers to be more mindful of their behavior through real-time warnings at scale while still giving them access to the game. The company says it hopes gamers will start to identify the behaviors that cause bans or flags and be less inclined to repeat them in the future. 

A 2014 study calculated that purchasing a physical copy of games larger than 4.5GB leaves a lower carbon footprint than downloading it to your console. This opens up opportunities for organizations to rethink their supply chain and create even lower emissions with sustainable packaging.

This is where Lush comes in. Lush sells beauty products without packaging, thanks to TensorFlow and GCP’s AI Platform. The cosmetics company wanted to remove packaging to improve sustainability and needed a way to share product ingredients and instructions with its consumers. With TensorFlow and the Google Cloud AI platform, Lush built Lush Lens, a mobile app that can identify its products and share key product information with consumers.

See how TensorFlow made it possible for Lush to sell their products without packaging:

As introduced in this article, new environmental challenges are arising in the gaming industry. Tackling these complex issues can be made actionable by means of technology. Through innovation, Google Cloud’s technology can help you face these challenges and make gaming more sustainable.