Eco-design in video games: rethinking creation for a sustainable impact
In 2023, the video game industry emitted around 40–50 Mt of CO₂, equivalent to the annual emissions of a country such as Switzerland or Norway.
One of the most important steps that can be taken to improve the impact of your activities is eco-designing your video games.
Eco-design involves integrating environmental considerations right from the design phase of a video game in order to reduce the game’s environmental impact throughout its entire life cycle.
Eco-design is gradually establishing itself as an essential approach for studios wishing to reduce their environmental impact, expand their addressable market and optimise their costs whilst maintaining high standards of quality and innovation.
Sources of environmental impact
Like most digital products, the environmental footprint of a video game originates mainly from its distribution and use, while the production phase usually accounts for a very small portion of the overall impact of a video game studio. Let’s take a closer look at the main sources of impact that studios can influence.
Firstly, the manufacturing of the equipment used to run the game (PC, console, smartphone), which require large quantities of materials, water and energy and emit significant amounts of CO₂ to be produced. System requirements have been creeping up for decades, but recent pressures on supply chains, and a general decline in technical acceleration rate have shown us that we need to seriously consider the type and power requirements necessary to run our games.
Next comes the distribution of the games. While less and less games are released in boxes and on cartridges, digital distribution still relies on servers and networks that consume resources and electricity.This impact grows further with every update; especially if they are poorly optimised. Not to mention the recent rise of the “digital-in-a-box” trend, which consists in producing and transporting physical plastic boxes that only contain a code to download the game (or even worse, an electronic keycard), in many ways the worst of both worlds.
Finally, the actual use phase by players requires a significant amount of energy to run the devices, screens and servers (in the case of online gaming), which in turn has a major impact on CO₂ emissions (which varies depending on the electricity mix of the countries where the game is played) and resources consumption.The design of a game can significantly influence these three aspects; it is important to be aware of them in order to understand how we can improve our practices. We will therefore examine them one by one to understand what we can do to reduce the environmental impact of games.
Reducing the impact of devices manufacturing
Reducing the impact of the user devices fabrication means extending their lifespan. Therefore, the first step you can take to address the impact of device production is to reduce the minimum system requirements (MSR) of your game, meaning that it can run on older equipment. For example, you could reduce RAM usage, which gets quite expensive these days, to extend the lifespan of your players’ computers, and even your hosting provider’s servers.
You can also prioritise backwards compatibility with older models, again to ease the strain on computer hardware, but this can also have a beneficial impact on your game’s smoothness. This is what Christian Buhl, technical director of Battlefield 6, tells us. By optimising the game to achieve 60 fps on the Xbox Series S, this has helped “make the entire game more stable”.
Finally, generally avoiding device-exclusive titles is a good practice to reduce the pressure for users to acquire multiple equipment.
Simply by taking these three steps, you can extend the lifespan of users’ hardware and reduce the environmental impact of manufacturing. That’s not all: you expand the size of the target market, reaching many players who don’t have high-spec setups or specific devices, whilst also reducing risks relating to the supply chain.
Reducing the impact of your games distribution
The distribution phase can be improved, first and foremost, by promoting and encouraging distribution methods that have less of an impact. This helps reduce the size of the game. All you need to do is adopt best practices for downloading :
- Encourage mobile users to download via Wi-Fi rather than 4G/5G
- Encourage users to disable automatic updates
- Schedule large updates outside the daily peak hours (7.00 pm – 11.00 pm)
- Spread downloads over time (e.g. pre-load a game before its release)
- Shift computing tasks to periods of lower-carbon energy production
Another way is to use eco-friendly hosting services; for example, OVHcloud’s Eco or Oxygenserv are servers that offer an ideal solution for hosting video games.
Finally, the third step that can be taken is to reduce the size of the game and its patches; numerous plug-ins are available, notably Microsoft’s DirectStorage 1.4.
As well as reducing the impact of distribution, you will also reduce the space taken up on servers and employees’ machines, as well as on players’ machines, and you will minimise friction during the various downloads. EA, for instance, was able to reduce average patch size by 80%, thus dividing the time it took to download an update by more than 3!
Reduce the amount of energy required to run your games
Reducing the impact of games during playtime means using less electricity to run them. We suggest four measures you can implement.
Firstly, you should consider adjusting your game settings (frame rates, resolution, brightness) to reduce the game’s energy consumption, especially during idle, pause or menu phases. Plug-ins are available to help with this, particularly for Unreal, Unity and Godot. Of course, those adjustments shouldn’t be done at the expense of player experience, but most games don’t require high-end settings to be enjoyed to their fullest. For instance, unless you’re developing a competitive FPS, you can usually cap your framerate at 60 FPS by default.
Next, you can optimise your code (logical breaks, checkpoints, etc.). Take Halo: Infinite as an example: when the game is paused, the rendering stops and is replaced by a static image. This makes it very easy to reduce the FPS and resolution, achieving a saving of 20 watts with minimal effort.
Let’s move on to encouraging selective resolution, which consists in adapting the game’s resolution according to the scenes the player is in. Epic Games implemented this in Fortnite, lowering the game’s resolution in lobbies and thus managing to save the equivalent of the yearly production of 14 wind turbines.
Finally, we recommend giving players the option to enable eco-mode settings, particularly for computers and mobile phones that aren’t very powerful.
By implementing all these measures, you will not only be able to reduce energy consumption, resulting in improved stability and gaming performance across all platforms, lower electricity bills for users and, consequently, greater user satisfaction, but also reduce equipment noise and heat (which is particularly important during the summer months), and extend the lifespan of players equipment. By optimising your game energy consumption, players can save up to 15% of the device’s battery life, which significantly extends the gaming time for them as well as preserves long-term lifetime of batteries.
A shift in studio practices
Eco-design entails a fundamental change in working methods. It requires raising awareness amongst teams, integrating eco-design into production processes, and strengthening collaboration between the various disciplines within the video game industry.
This change goes beyond simply adopting tools or best practices; it is based on a comprehensive and strategic approach to creation.
The importance of measurement
To be effective, an eco-design approach must be based on precise indicators. Measuring the environmental footprint helps to identify the main sources of impact and prioritise actions.
Specialised tools are now being developed to support studios in this process, offering them greater visibility into their environmental performance and facilitating decision-making.
This is the case with the JYROS environmental impact calculator, which allows you to identify your studio’s major sources of emissions and provides you with easily implementable actions to reduce your footprint.
A strategic challenge for the industry
Matières premières et déchets électroniques
Eco-design is now part of a broader trend that goes beyond environmental responsibility alone. It responds to growing expectations from institutions, partners and players. Today, 75% of gamers consider climate change to be a matter close to their hearts, with 56% believing that the video game industry has a responsibility to take action on its own emissions.
Finally, when surveyed by Microsoft , 84% of people questioned at Gamescom 2025 stated that they want energy-saving modes in their games.
In some cases, it has even become a criterion for accessing funding or support schemes.It is also a way to secure better interest rates on your loans, or to strengthen your annual reports.
But beyond all these benefits, eco-design allows you to spark enriching conversations with employees, players and external parties in the video game industry. Studios that incorporate these considerations today are positioning themselves favourably to meet future market demands.
