No shit. In the case of physical, you’re talking about the manufacturing of plastic and use of machines to imprint the discs and then all of the driving done to ship the discs. And then eventually that plastic will end up in a landfill somewhere.

The study isn’t calling for you to stop buying physical so much as it’s trying to encourage gamers and lawmakers to embrace the second hand markets more, but that’s not really an option for a lot of games nowadays that are just download codes.

As you said:

"The above article is a prime example of trying to blame consumers for pollution when in truth it is done by billion dollar corporations."



It's the same misdirection tactic with wealth 'distribution' and income disparity, blame the immigrants and social security... 


Help the environment by eating less meat, drive less, combine your shopping trips / online orders, walk or bike for small errands, vacation locally (Worldwide holiday travel is responsible for approximately 8% of global carbon emissions) and vote for (actual) green policies. (Not carbon offset scams)


Misdirection from carbon scams:

Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe

Investigation into Verra carbon standard finds most are ‘phantom credits’ and may worsen global heating.

The forest carbon offsets approved by the world’s leading certifier and used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations are largely worthless and could make global heating worse, according to a new investigation.

The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that, based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be “phantom credits” and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.


Carbon fraud is on the rise—but so is the regulatory counteroffensive
https://www.aoshearman.com/en/insights/carbon-fraud-is-on-the-rise

Due to rising pressure to meet net-zero targets, both through legislation as well as through public opinion, carbon trading and carbon markets have grown significantly. At the same time, reports of non-compliant behavior have increased. There are numerous factors that make both compliance and voluntary markets particularly vulnerable to abuse.

Firstly, purchasers have limited insight into the reduction procedures and verification processes may be inadequate. Typical cases include “ghost credits”, which refer to carbon reductions that are entirely made up. Closely related to this are cases of overstated impact, where the amount of carbon offset by these projects is exaggerated. Another example is double counting, which occurs when a carbon reduction is claimed multiple times or by multiple parties, e.g. by using the same credit in different trading schemes and/or in different jurisdictions. 


Oh and I doubt all the forest fires are subtracted from Carbon offset claims...

In 2024, forest fires contributed to a significant increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, with global fire emissions totaling over 8 billion tonnes CO2. A major factor was the unprecedented Amazon fires, which released approximately 791 million tonnes of CO2, equivalent to Germany's annual emissions and a sevenfold increase from the previous two years. Other regions like Canada also experienced severe fire activity. The Canadian wildfires released more carbon in the first five months of the season than Russia or Japan emitted from fossil fuels in all of 2022.

Keep collecting discs and cartridges. It makes no difference, except you actually get to keep something.


Now since the bike I ordered has a carbon fiber frame, does that mean it's a carbon sink :) 
(No, it's actually 3 times worse to produce than aluminum bikes doh, but it's much better on your body, elbow pain gone since carbon handlebars)

In the case of digital, you're talking about building and maintaining always on data centers to provide you that download anywhere, anytime. It all requires power and water for cooling, and eventually all those server racks end up in a landfill somewhere :p

But yeah agreed, second hand market was much better for everyone. Hence this commercial completely misses the mark



Bring me back to then. I miss browsing through the pre-owned sections, come back home with gems or buy new games at discounts for bringing old games back in. Digital games I don't want to keep are worthless.

1. Digital servers and AI also eat up a lot of energy and cause a lot of pollution.
2. Yes, the waste is very concerning. But it is much more complicated than physical games.
3. I buy probably about 5-10 brand new physical games a year and buy some used ones as well.

WTF? That is one of the worst ads I have ever seen in my life. This ad belongs in 2012 when XB1 was threatening to force always online crap. And it really shows that MS has learned absolutely nothing in that time. 

Yeah, in fact this is how we play now (Friend of my youngest came over to play, early gen Alpha at play)



'Split-screen' setup, PS5 + Series X, and they choose to play Jailbreak on Roblox. Grand Theft Roblox.

And that's after an hour of updating, recovering log in credentials, passwords, 2-factor authentification, both to sign into the boxes and to sign into Roblox.

Give me back the old style playing together on one TV, one box, no logins. Press X to join. Not like both machines can't easily run Roblox in 4 player split-screen... But they both got their own 'skins' to play with from their accounts, so important 🙄


Now how many times more carbon intensive is that compared to eg Road Rash Jailbreak on PS1

You know how much forest are getting destroyed to make your soya beans 

Billions of insects massacared for it.

Vegans are hypocritz

On the one hand, it breaks my soul to see kids playing such a horrible game. On the other hand, I know that a large portion of Gen Alpha will never have serious discretionary income due to a number of factors. Rent and cost of living is rising so fast, while jobs are disappearing. In the USA lots of Gen Alpha kids, simply won't be employable, because they didn't develop properly. So many people these days don't understand what a necessary bill is. People are not only taught to overspend, but taught that said overspending is "needed". Instead of buying a cheap four-door car, they sign up for an expensive SUV at 9% interest. Instead of having a 5GB cell phone plan, they have an unlimited plan. Instead of paying attention to their actual health, they sign up for the most expensive variant of health insurance, which they ironically need because they are obese. Instead of just buying a two-bedroom house, they buy a three-bedroom house, with a finished basement and a three-car garage. This type of learned overspending fuels global warming far more than any simple videogame discs. It also has the effect of making people live paycheck to paycheck. And so they don't have money for new games for their kids. So a lot of kids just gravitate to what's free. And then that free game takes over in elementary schools and becomes so popular that even kids whose parents are responsible want to play it. 

And that leads to you having to juryrig two TVs and systems together to do what an N64 did easily 29 years ago. 

And I think MS is way too overconfident that Gen Alpha will somehow take over gaming in the next decade, while making traditional games obsolete. People can quote the growth of Gen Alpha and a bunch of other stuff all they want. But there are "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics."

Unless you live in a cave, never travel by car, and don't use plastic or electricity, you're in no position to be lecturing others.

I believe that was me. I've done the math before on multiple occasions when someone brought up plastic waste in regards to video games.

Even if every video game disc ever sold worldwide was thrown away, the resulting pile would fit into the average suburban residential lot. Let's say there's been six billion discs sold between the PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, Wii, 360, and XBO. A standard optical disc has a volume of approximately 13.57 cm³, so if you melted them all down and formed them into a solid cube, said cube would be a bit over 43 meters/140 feet per edge. That would fit in my back yard. In the U.S. alone, all the garbage tossed in one year amounts to a cube 805 meters tall. So, even if every game disc ever made over the past 30 years was thrown out, it would amount to less than 0.02% of the U.S.'s annual garbage output. They'd take up just a tiny sliver of a single landfill. If you tossed all the cases, that would take up over 20 times as much space, but that's still nothing compared to the total amount of trash produced from all sources. This is an extreme scenario, obviously, as relatively few physical games are just thrown in the garbage.

The amount of waste produced through the purchase of physical games is vastly overstated. It's a tiny drop in the bucket.

Now if you're talking about plastic consumption, the combined weight of those six billion discs, cases included, would be about 560,000 tons. Again, that's what was used over the course of nearly 30 years. The world produced about 460 million tons of plastic in 2019, and probably around 10 billion tons of the stuff since plastics have been a thing. So, physical video games are again just a tiny drop in the bucket. All entertainment media going full digital won't even a make a dent in global plastic production & consumption.

Going full-digital with our media isn't going to do squat to save the world, and trying to guilt-trip people for wanting to actually own their movies, games, books, albums, etc., is more "blame the consumer" bullshit. Two-thirds of our CO2 emissions in the U.S. are from transportation and electricity generation. We need our power to come from renewables, with nuclear as at least a supplementary stopgap for the next couple of decades. We need total electrification of our mechanical transportation, and beyond just that we really ought to be moving away from our dependence on automobiles (EVs are less bad than gas-powered cars, but they're cars and therefore still very bad) and moving towards a system focused on walking, cycling, and mass transit (note for the reading comprehension-impaired: that doesn't mean "ban all cars"). Our problems with climate weren't created by poor decisions by consumers. They were created by poor government policy, policy influenced by heavy lobbying by fossil fuel and automobile companies. If just the U.S. by itself got 90% of its electricity from nuclear for the past 50 years and we never developed automobile dependency after WW2, we probably wouldn't even be having a conversation about climate change.