PlayStation Joins Forces with the United Nations to Combat Climate Change

At the UN Climate Summit, I will join leaders in the gaming industry to make formal commitments to contribute to the efforts of the UN Environment committee through a new partnership, the Playing for the Planet alliance.

We believe that careful stewardship of natural resources is of utmost importance and are aligned with the mission and objectives of UN Environment. Earlier this year, they created a new Youth and Environment Alliance and quickly realized partnering with the video game industry would help them reach their sustainable development goals.

At SIE, we have made substantial commitments and efforts to reduce the power consumption of the PS4 by utilizing efficient technologies such as System-on-a-Chip architecture integrating a high-performance graphics processor, die shrink, power scaling, as well as energy saving modes such as Suspend-to-RAM. For context, we estimate the carbon emissions we have avoided to date already amount to almost 16 million metric tons, increasing to 29 million metric tons over the course of the next 10 years (which equals the CO2 emissions for the nation of Denmark in 2017).

I am also very pleased to announce the next generation PlayStation console will include the possibility to suspend gameplay with much lower power consumption than PS4 (which we estimate can be achieved at around 0.5 W). If just one million users enable this feature, it would save equivalent to the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes.

From an operations point of view, we will complete a carbon footprint assessment of our gaming services and will report the energy efficiency measures we employ at our data centers. We are committed to informing consumers of energy efficient console set-up and use.

Our commitments are not only related to hardware and operations, we are also keen to help inform people interested in sustainability goals. We have committed to working with the industry and climate experts to develop reference information for use by game developers that wish to include sustainability themes in games. In addition, we will investigate potential PS VR applications that can raise awareness of climate issues and climate experts.

The gaming community is diverse and growing at a fast pace. There is an undeniable opportunity for leaders in the games industry to take a stand and support the UN Environment team by communicating the importance of preserving natural resources for generations to come. At PlayStation, we believe games have the power to ignite social change through educating people, evoking emotions, and inspiring hope. We could not be more proud to be part of the Playing for the Planet Alliance and the commitments announced. We look forward to seeing what the industry can achieve together.