Next-gen gaming is an environmental nightmare


It’s sad The truth is that only escapist efforts are seldom different from real life, some have a nasty tendency to aggravate real life problems. And while gaming regains thinking about both individual and global doomsday, it threatens to bring at least one – weather disaster closer to reality.

What’s with plastic casing, mind-metal circuit boards, guzzled power and e-waste, gaming has been an eco-friendly for decades. Now, corresponding to more meta trends in technology, gaming technology is becoming smaller and more invisible. Cloud gaming has come with digital consoles like the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition and the Xbox Series S, with buttons on the games menu screens. You won’t see exactly 70000 Atari 2600 ET Cartridges buried in the desert of New Mexico.

But, while many gamers will eat the disc, experts say the low-visibility technique isn’t technically equal to the planet’s minimal damage in any way, and the entire sports industry isn’t on track to reduce its carbon footprint. Right now, the U.S. The gaming platform represents 34 terawatt-hours a year in million euros of consumption – more than the entire state of West Virginia, with similar carbon dioxide emissions of more than 5 million cars. And it’s just going to get worse. “Total emissions are rising,” says Gary Cook, director of the Global Climate Campaign for Stand.Earth, an environmental nonprofit set up to challenge corporations’ climate practices. “There’s a real calculation that needs to happen.”

Two features define the next-gen console: digital services and big-dad specs. You can pick up all the. 300 Digital Xbox Series S from MicroS.FT and live a disc clutter-free life by downloading games from the cloud. You can leave the console altogether and sign up for Google Stadia, Xbox’s Game Pass Ultimate or any smartphone-based cloud gaming services. Even if you don’t choose a specified PlayStation opt, you’ll still be able to download very large video games from Northern Virginia, Las Vegas, Chicago, and the next data center.

In an interview with Wired, Micro .ft executives described how the future of the Xbox is not about removing hardware altogether. Cloud gaming is addictive. MicroSt .ft wants to reach potential gamers where they are already, expanding its user base to everyone who might even think gaming instinctively. It envisions customers logging in Minecraft Their Galaxy S20, their Xbox Series S and on their PCs, are all built into the Micro .ft ecosystem. It has a lot of hardware, and a lot of power.

“If people like to play games, we want to be as efficient as possible in delivering that experience, either through a console or in a data center-driven environment,” said Krim Choudhury, vice president of Microsoft Microsoft Ft. March’s interview with Wire. “We’re working very hard on those issues, all in the envelope of an extended micro .ft carbon-neutral initiative.”

Microsoft plans to remain carbon-negative by 2030. But like Sony, which wants to achieve a zero environmental footprint by 2050, Microsoft declined to answer WIRED’s specific questions about changes to its supply chain, console manufacturing technologies and data centers to meet that goal. . (Nintendo, which has not yet announced the next-gen console, has announced some initiatives in recycling and notoxic substances). With the dual wind of large console performance and the huge demand for server-side computing meet, the gaming industry could stabilize for a fairly-both-world situation.

“The worst case scenario is that you still use relatively energy-intensive hardware on your side and even then use a cloud gaming platform that runs a lot on the backend in terms of demand,” says Cook.

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