“We are replacing the plastic box that is typically used across the industry with a reinforced, 100% recycled gatefold cardboard sleeve, made with 100% recycled fibres,” the company’s chief executive, Miles Jacobson, said at the time. Sports Interactive, the developer of Football Manager, decided two years ago to be the change it wants to see in the world, and stopped shipping the game in plastic boxes entirely. Some developers have made major changes in the areas that are under their control. “A lot of companies are going to be going through the process of trying to cut their emissions and finding the that, because they’re suddenly largely remote, they can’t – and they shouldn’t – be going into any employee’s life and saying ‘you need to put a jumper on! You need to turn down the heating!’ And so because of that, it’s travel to events like that’s the biggest piece of the puzzle.”
In traditional carbon accounting, the biggest expenditure for a small indie studio like Alliot’s is probably travel, according to Graeme Struthers, the co-founder of publisher Devolver, who will publish Nerial’s forthcoming Card Shark. The life of the hardware, the energy and the materials used to make the computers themselves – that’s something everybody needs to take some responsibility for.” “I think we have to acknowledge that there is a video game supply chain, and a hardware lifecycle. “The impact of playing the games is one of the impacts of the industry, but it’s not the only thing,” she says. Tamara Alliot, the chief executive of game developer Nerial – and a former sustainability manager before she moved into games – points out that there are lots of ways that a developer can tackle its footprint before even needing to pay attention to the trickier philosophical points. This weekend, I spent some time at the WASD event in London, hoping to find an answer. So what does it mean to be a climate-conscious game developer? It produces a leisure product, which exists almost entirely in software, and can, depending on decisions made by the developer, use as much electricity as boiling a kettle or as little as powering a wristwatch. The games industry, in some ways, faces the purest distillation of this question. But for others, the decisions are trickier.
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