That's a good point, but I'm not sure it's quite as drastic as you think.
There are about 400 million current and last-gen consoles that have been sold, all-time. I'd wager most of them spend 95% or more of their time unused.
Steam shows about 20-30 million players online at any given point. Let's pretend this represents 50% of the PC gaming population (a vast underestimate of Steam's market share in the US and EU, not sure about other markets like China). What fraction of those are gaming PCs? Gaming laptops? Laptops with integrated graphics that really aren't meant for gaming?
Let's say that your typical PC gamer uses 300W when playing video games. That's probably on the low end for a gaming PC, but an overestimate for any laptop. 300W * 24 * 365 * 60 million is about 160 billion kWh. That translates to, um, 33000 tons of CO2? So like 3 orders of magnitude smaller?
I'm not even going to bother with the mobile game population because the power draw on those is like single-digit watts so even if there are 100x more players, the numbers are around the same order of magnitude.
Even if my estimates of number of PC gamers at any moment and the wattage of the typical device are both off by 10x, that's still way smaller than the estimate of how carbon-intensive it is to make games.
There are about 400 million current and last-gen consoles that have been sold, all-time. I'd wager most of them spend 95% or more of their time unused.
Steam shows about 20-30 million players online at any given point. Let's pretend this represents 50% of the PC gaming population (a vast underestimate of Steam's market share in the US and EU, not sure about other markets like China). What fraction of those are gaming PCs? Gaming laptops? Laptops with integrated graphics that really aren't meant for gaming?
Let's say that your typical PC gamer uses 300W when playing video games. That's probably on the low end for a gaming PC, but an overestimate for any laptop. 300W * 24 * 365 * 60 million is about 160 billion kWh. That translates to, um, 33000 tons of CO2? So like 3 orders of magnitude smaller?
I'm not even going to bother with the mobile game population because the power draw on those is like single-digit watts so even if there are 100x more players, the numbers are around the same order of magnitude.
Even if my estimates of number of PC gamers at any moment and the wattage of the typical device are both off by 10x, that's still way smaller than the estimate of how carbon-intensive it is to make games.