Sustainable Games Alliance aims to make industry climate friendly

The Sustainable Games Alliance, a non-profit cooperative of game companies and trade associations, has formally announced its launch with the goal of making games the most sustainable form of entertainment on the planet.

The Sustainable Games Alliance creates specific and actionable ways to measure, understand and reduce the footprint of the global games industry, designed for the needs of people who make games.

“Games are the defining entertainment medium of the 21st century and a huge industry generating almost 200 billion in annual revenues, and we believe the industry can and should also lead on sustainability”, said Jiri Kupiainen, former Disney vice president and serial gaming entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the industry. “We’re seeing strong demand to act from players, employees and regulators, and many companies want to do the right thing. By working together we can coordinate and enable definite, specific action that’s based on latest data and leading research.”

Kupiainen is the chairperson and cofounder of the SGA. I interviewed him about the nonprofit.

As one of its key initiatives, the Sustainable Games Alliance is developing 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 metrics and data, and so it’s in a unique position to leverage all that also in sustainability” said Ben Abraham, author of “Digital Games After Climate Change” and one of the leading researchers globally working on games and sustainability.

SGA is developing the standard working closely with its members to simplify compliance with key regulations such as the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) and the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

“We can make it easy and reliable for game companies to report on sustainability matters in a way that is data driven, comparable and transparent — and actionable for the people that make games so that they can reduce their footprint,” said Abraham, SGA’s standard & research lead.

To guide the effort to develop a unified reporting model for the games industry, the alliance is today also releasing a briefing paper on gaming’s scope 3 emissions that is freely available on its website at https://sustainablegamesalliance.org/standard/.

The Sustainable Games Alliance is a global member driven cooperative with its operations overseen by managing director and cofounder Maria Wagner. Wagner previously led the Berlin and Brandenburg area gaming initiative Games:net and cofounded the innovative environmental conservation non-profit Games Forest Club.

“Concrete action is needed, and by working together with a unified set of actions, it’s more efficient and cost-effective for all the member companies and associations,” Wagner said in a statement. “The games industry’s growth over the past 20 years has been stunning, and if we can show the way – not only on revenues, but sustainability as well – we can inspire other industries to follow suit.”

The alliance is backed by games industry veterans like Petri Järvilehto (cofounder, Remedy Entertainment and Seriously Entertainment) and David Helgason (founder of Unity Technologies and the Transition VC fund), and counts many leading European game companies and associations as its members.

A personal journey

Kupiainen went through a period of “pre-exploration” in 2018 or so when he was living in Helsinki but had to work for Disney in Los Angeles. He was commuting every few weeks and realizing that he was generating a big carbon footprint, even though he viewed himself as a “very green person.”

“I starting thinking about my footprint and got some assessment of the hundreds of tons of CO2 that I am responsible for,” Kupiainen said. “That process led in a way to the SGA. I started trying to figure out ways to bridge the gaming world and sustainability.”

At first, he started talking about sustainable business travel and alternatives to flying. He became an adviser on some projects and donating money to the conservation of nature. Kupiainen met Wagner in Berlin on one of the projects and they backpacked around Europe for a couple of months to raise awareness in gaming.

“The nerds one. Gaming is the biggest thing we founded. It’s the most influential media right now. Whether it’s four billion,” Kupiainen said. But what are we doing with that? What’s our responsibility? How do we think about sustainability?”

He noted it’s not really possible to figure out the footprint of the games industry.

“We had this kind of this like moment of clarity where we realized that a lot of people who work in games really care about this stuff. Everybody wants to do the right thing,” Kupiainen said.

Yet he noted that no one was really quantifying the environmental cost of making games.

Kupiainen said, “We felt that you just can’t have the conversation on minimizing the amount if you don’t even know what the numbers are.”

The process for standards

The group will start announcing members among mid-sized European game companies and some that have been around for decades. There are a bunch of trade associations joining too.

“I’m quite excited for games because this is our chance to actually get some face time with bigger companies,” Kupiainen said. “I think a lot of companies tried to do something, but they didn’t fully understand the space. They burned their fingers. And I think it requires quite a lot of trust to kind of get involved in a new initiative that’s generally trying to assess the sustainability footprint of our industry.”

The first thing the group will do is develop standard for how to actually calculate and measure emissions for a game studio in a way that’s comparable across studios. Such a system doesn’t exist today, he said. The 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 establish this standard.”

The European Union will help with the effort as it is focused on the larger corporate sustainability movement. The SGA will provide an alternative designed for game companies, and that should come out to be less expensive.

“We’re trying to facilitate knowledge sharing,” Kupiainen said. “We can see which companies are doing good work, and then we can work with them and share the best practices and standardize the ways that are already working. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”

Among the possibilities are ideas like getting rid of physical packages and disks. On the other hand, he said he doubts the group will make any recommendations like capping a player’s frame rate and reducing performance for the sake of using less energy.

There are other efforts under way like the Gaming for Good cause and the United Nations‘ efforts to promote sustainability through video games.

“I’m not aware of anyone else seriously developing a standard for the measurement and reporting of gaming emissions,” Kupiainen said.

Roadmap

“We’re going to start announcing the members and then the rest of the year will just be getting our hands dirty and finalizing the first version of the standard,” Kupiainen said. “The aim is that in Q1 we will have the first full version of the calculation and reporting Standard.”

Then companies will start reporting their data, and the group will focus on what is actionable. That will help produce a “global efficiency footprint” for the game industry once enough game 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 will have to substantiate their claims. A third party will have to verify the claims.

“This will provide information that can actually change things,” he said.