Hot Games: Towards a Holistic Assessment of the Planet Warming Emissions of Video Games based on 2024-2025 Data

Abstract

Following on recent reports on specific platforms or companies, this paper provides an assessment of the global impact of the production and use of video games. It draws together publicly available data on game development, hardware, games sold, download sizes, time spent playing games on different platforms, and subscriptions to multiplayer and cloud game services. It provides an update to figures published 2020 and 2022. Crucially, our account of emissions related to video games considers a wide range of categories, yet contains enough detail to be critiqued and improved in the future.