A recent study compared the environmental impact of physical and digital video games, and it turns out that downloading games is much better for the planet. Researchers at the French firm Greenly found that making and distributing physical game copies creates 100 times more carbon emissions than simply offering the game as a digital download.
Greenly estimates that making and shipping a million physical game copies could generate 312 tons of carbon dioxide. In contrast, downloading the same game a million times – assuming it’s 70GB – would only produce three tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
While cloud gaming requires a lot of energy to run its servers, we shouldn’t forget the environmental impact of making and packaging physical games. Downloading a digital game does use electricity at home and in data centers, but it still creates less waste than producing physical copies and consoles, which contribute significantly to landfills and overall waste. As study author Stephanie Safdie pointed out to GamesIndustry.biz, the waste from physical media remains a major concern.
Making physical game discs and consoles uses a lot of resources. It requires mining rare earth metals and producing plastic, all of which demands energy, machinery, and labor. Consoles alone use 3.9 terawatt hours of electricity annually in the US and create 1.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. When you add in the energy used by TVs and consider gaming on all platforms – consoles, phones, and cloud services – the environmental impact of gaming is substantial.
What can gamers who care about the environment do? Greenly’s research shows that handheld gaming consoles have a much smaller carbon footprint – around 13.8kg of CO2e per year for the Nintendo Switch, for instance. They also recommend that gaming companies find ways to use less energy overall.
I’ve been really impressed with how much Microsoft is doing to be more sustainable. They’re putting a lot of effort into using recycled materials and creating power-saving features – it’s great to see!
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2025-11-04 17:14