Sony has announced that it will join the UN’s efforts to fight climate change through the United Nations “Playing for the Planet” initiative. The initiative appears designed to support the development of games that encourage players to think about the impact of climate change and work to preserve or document the natural world, as well as encouraging developers and hardware manufacturers to adopt more sustainable methods of manufacturing, use renewable power for manufacturing, and reduce e-waste by making consoles and other gaming hardware 100 percent recyclable.
Sony’s blog post on the initiative notes that it will achieve some of its goals for “Play for the Planet” by targeting much lower idle power. Jim Ryan, President and CEO of SIE, writes that the new 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).” Currently, the PS4 reportedly uses ~8.5W-10W in Rest Mode. A report from 2014 by the NRDC identified that some consoles use up to 40 percent of their total power in Standby mode, thanks to USB charging (Sony) and Kinect (Xbox One).
This may be why Ryan followed his statement by saying, “If just one million users enable this feature, it would save equivalent to the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes” (emphasis added). Why would end-users need to enable the feature at all? Why wouldn’t this feature be enabled by default? When you buy or set up a Windows PC, it’s configured to use features like Sleep and Hibernate out of the box. To the best of my knowledge, consoles also tend to enable these features automatically.
The answer may be that Sony is going to offer gamers the option to disable features like USB charging while the console is asleep. The National Resource Defense Council called for Sony to take this step years ago when the Xbox One and PS4 were new. It’s always good to give people options to improve power consumption, but that’s not the same as baking these improvements into the end product.
It’s going to be very interesting to see how the PS5 and Xbox Next compare with previous generations in absolute power consumption. The Xbox 360 and PS3 set power consumption records at their respective launches; future versions of both consoles used less power. This slide from the 2014 NRDC report shows relative power consumption between product generations as of 2014:
Data by NRDC, 2014
The Xbox One X and PS4 Pro
are both capable of exceeding the power consumption of their base models — the improvements gained from moving to 16/14nm from 28nm were not enough to entirely offset the increased power consumption required by the hardware inside the unit. Ultimately, what’s going to really make the difference on the consumer side is whether the new SoCs from AMD use less power for actual gaming relative to their predecessors. It’s not at all clear if they will, and that makes Sony’s current promise ring a little hollow as far as individual consumer hardware is concerned. We’re going to need more data to ascertain just how much this promise is worth.
The rest of the promises Sony makes are concerned with transparency. The company has pledged to complete a carbon footprint assessment and report how it measures energy efficiency. It will also give gamers data on energy-efficient console usage. It will also work with developers to create reference material to be used in games focusing on sustainability themes and investigate using PSVR to raise awareness of climate change issues.
While the Sony blog post doesn’t specifically call it out, the company is working to improve sustainability in other areas. The company intends to source 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2040 and is committed to reducing its CO2 emissions. More details on those goals and the company’s climate pledges are available here.
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