There’s no denying it, climate change is real. The past five years have been the hottest on record. Teen activists are suing world leaders to make sure there will still be a habitable world in the next few decades. You can and should do everything possible in your personal life to reduce your contributions to the ongoing crisis. But really, it’s these big companies that do the vast majority of the damage and have the power to actually fix things.
In the world of video games, there aren’t many companies bigger than Sony and Microsoft. Fortunately, both are now pledging to help fight climate change through new features of their upcoming consoles the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlett.
Let’s start with PlayStation. To reduce the carbon footprint of the next-generation console, Sony includes new energy-saving features in the PlayStation 5. In a blog post Sony Interactive CEO Jim Ryan explained that by enabling the optional mode the machine “suspend gameplay with much lower power consumption.” It takes a lot of power to feed machines this powerful. But the estimated 0.5 watts would be a pretty dramatic decrease. For comparison, the more modest Nintendo Switch uses 7.5 watts during actual gameplay.
Meanwhile, Xbox is taking a different approach. Microsoft will make nearly one million future Xbox consoles carbon neutral, the first carbon neutral console ever. And with the Xbox Scarlett a little over a year away, we hope this is them just setting the precedent when it comes to producing the new system.
Both of these initiatives are part of the United Nations’ new Playing for the Planet Alliance, which along with Sony and Microsoft also counts Google, Rovio, Twitch, Ubisoft, and others among its members.
While they don’t run on fossil fuels, collectively video game consoles emit so much harmful carbon they rival the millions of Co2 tonnes from cars and small countries. So hopefully the next generation reverses that trend so we have future generations to come. For more, slightly lower-stakes information about the two consoles, here’s everything else we know about PlayStation 5 vs. Xbox Scarlett.
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