I think I’ve always suspected that something happens behind the TV when I download a game or a patch, or I play online, but I’ve never seriously stopped to think about what. And when I say behind the TV, I don’t mean actually behind the TV, I mean on the internet. I know that data gets piped out and sent back, because that’s how I download the files to play games, but beyond that, I don’t really know what’s truly taking place. I’ve never needed to think about it before.
Except recently, I began wondering. I am worried about the climate emergency and I was looking at my life and thinking about the things I do and the effect they have on our world. And I looked at gaming and I didn’t know. It quite clean. There’s no packaging waste in the way there once was because I download most of my games, and none of my machines cause noticeable spikes on my electricity smart meter, not like my shower does.
But then there was this niggling thought that perhaps it wasn’t as clean as I wanted it to be. Somewhere in my mind I knew it had to do with data centres, and I’d heard some pretty bad things about how much power they consumed. ‘Why don’t we know more about this?’ I wondered. But as I looked around, I couldn’t find the information I needed.
At around the same time, my fellow Eurogamer writer Chris Tapsell came to me with similar thoughts of his own. He’d been alarmed by the IPCC report on climate change and wanted to look more closely at what the games industry was doing to improve. So, we decided to work together. We decided to pool our resources and find the answers we readily couldn’t. What does it cost the environment when you download a game? Today, we’re publishing our answer.