The Sustainable Games Alliancea non-profit organization of gaming companies and industry associations, has officially announced its launch with the goal of making games the most sustainable form of entertainment on the planet.
The Sustainable Games Alliance develops specific and actionable ways to measure, understand and reduce the footprint of the global games industry, tailored to the needs of the people who make games.
“Games are the defining entertainment medium of the 21st century and a massive industry generating nearly $200 billion in annual revenue, and we believe the industry can and should lead the way on sustainability as well,” said Jiri Kupiainen, former Disney vice president and serial gaming entrepreneur with more than 20 years of industry experience. “We’re seeing strong demand for action from players, employees and regulators, and many companies want to do the right thing. By working together, we can coordinate and enable definitive, targeted action based on the latest data and leading research.”
Kupiainen is the chairman and co-founder of the SGA. I interviewed him about the non-profit.
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One of the key initiatives of the Sustainable Games Alliance is to develop a free, open and global industry standard for sustainability reporting for companies that develop, publish or operate games.
“Gaming is one of the world’s leading industries in terms of statistics and data, so it is uniquely positioned to leverage all of this in the field of sustainability,” said Ben Abraham, author of “Digital Games After Climate Change” and one of the world’s leading researchers on games and sustainability.
SGA is working closely with its members to develop the standard to facilitate compliance with key regulations such as the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) and the EU Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
“We can make it simple and reliable for games companies to report on sustainability issues in a data-driven, comparable and transparent way – and actionable for the people who make games to reduce their footprint,” said Abraham, SGA’s standards and research lead.
To guide the development of a uniform reporting framework for the games industry, the Alliance is also publishing today a briefing paper on the games industry’s Scope 3 emissions, available for free on its website https://sustainablegamesalliance.org/standard/.
The Sustainable Games Alliance is a global member-driven cooperative led by Managing Director and Co-Founder Maria Wagner. Wagner previously led the gaming initiative Games:net in the Berlin and Brandenburg region and co-founded the innovative environmental conservation non-profit Games Forest Club.
“Concrete action is needed and working together on a uniform set of actions is more efficient and cost-effective for all member companies and associations,” Wagner said in a statement. “The growth of the games industry over the past 20 years has been astonishing and if we can show the way – not just in terms of revenue, but also sustainability – we can inspire other industries to follow suit.”
The alliance is backed by gaming industry veterans such as Petri Järvilehto (co-founder of Remedy Entertainment and Seriously Entertainment) and David Helgason (founder of Unity Technologies and Transition VC fund). Many leading European gaming companies and associations are members of the alliance.
A personal journey
Kupiainen went through a period of “pre-exploration” in 2018 or thereabouts when he was living in Helsinki but had to work for Disney in Los Angeles. He was commuting every few weeks and realized that he was generating a large carbon footprint, even though he considered himself a “very green person.”
“I started thinking about my footprint and got an estimate of hundreds of tons of CO2 that I’m responsible for,” Kupiainen said. “That process kind of led to the SGA. I started trying to find ways to bridge the gaming world and sustainability.”
First he started talking about sustainable business travel and alternatives to flying. He became an advisor on a number of projects and donated money to conservation. Kupiainen met Wagner in Berlin at one of the projects and they traveled around Europe for a few months to raise awareness about gaming.
“The nerds won. Gaming is the biggest thing we’ve ever created. It’s the most influential medium right now. Whether it’s three billion or four billion,” Kupiainen said. But what do we do with it? What’s our responsibility? How do we think about sustainability?”
He noted that it is not really possible to know the footprint of the games industry due to the lack of comparable data. But once that data is available, it will be possible to assess the footprint.
“We kind of had a moment of clarity where we realized that a lot of people who work in games really care about this. Everyone wants to do the right thing,” Kupiainen said.
Still, he noted that no one really quantifies the environmental costs of making games.
Kupiainen said: “We felt that you can't have the conversation about minimising the amount if you don't even know what the numbers are.”
The process for standards
The group will start by announcing members among mid-sized European gaming companies and some that have been around for decades. There are also a number of industry associations that are joining.
“I'm really looking forward to games because this is our chance to actually get some facetime with larger companies,” Kupiainen said. “I think a lot of companies have tried something, but they didn't quite understand the space. They burned their fingers. And I think it takes a fair amount of trust to get involved in a new initiative that's generally trying to assess the sustainability footprint of our industry.”
The first thing the group is going to do is develop a standard for how to actually calculate and measure emissions for a game studio in a way that is comparable across studios. Such a system doesn’t exist today, he said. Data from different companies isn’t comparable.
“It doesn't really tell us much about how those companies are actually doing,” Kupiainen said. “Which ones are the worst? Which ones are trying to account for the whole value chain, right? Our first priority is just to set that standard.”
The European Union will help with the effort, as it focuses on the broader corporate sustainability movement. The SGA will provide an alternative designed for gaming companies, and it should be cheaper.
“We try to facilitate knowledge sharing,” Kupiainen said. “We can see which companies are doing a good job, and then we can work with them and share best practices and standardize the ways it already works. We don't have to reinvent the wheel.”
Possibilities include ideas like doing away with physical packs and discs. On the other hand, he said he doubts the group will make recommendations like limiting a player's frame rate and slowing down performance to use less power.
There are also other efforts underway, such as the Gaming for a good cause cause and the United Nations' efforts to promote sustainability through video games.
“I don't know of anyone else who is seriously developing a standard for measuring and reporting gaming emissions,” Kupiainen said.
Roadmap
“We're going to announce the members and then spend the rest of the year rolling up our sleeves and finalizing the first version of the standard,” Kupiainen said. “The goal is to have the first full version of the calculation and reporting standard in Q1.”
Then companies will start reporting their data, and the group will focus on what's useful. That will help produce a “global efficiency footprint” for the gaming industry once enough gaming companies provide the data. Then the group can push for change, Kupiainen said.
There is also a “green claims directive” in the European Union, where companies have to substantiate their claims. A third party has to verify the claims.
“This will provide information that can actually bring about change,” he said.