Sony Interactive Entertainment today revealed as part of the UN Climate Summit that it will take part in a new effort called the Playing for the Planet alliance, which includes several other large video game companies. What this actually looks like will vary by company, but for Sony and the PlayStation brand, it apparently means making a number of changes and decisions in the pursuit of energy efficiency — including a new feature for the PlayStation 5.
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Specifically, SIE President and CEO Jim Ryan revealed in an official PlayStation.Blog post that the PlayStation 5, or whatever it officially ends up being called, will include a feature where it consumes far less power during the suspension of gameplay. According to Ryan, SIE estimates that if a million users turn this feature on — and it sounds like it’s something they will need to opt into doing — it’d save “the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes.” Over what period of time is, again, unclear, but it’s nothing to scoff at either.
PlayStation is making substantial efforts to combat climate change with “Playing for the Planet,” as part of an alliance with industry leaders. Learn more: https://t.co/6WcJzaJFPI pic.twitter.com/rSBfZJ7AL6
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) September 23, 2019
“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,” Ryan shares in the blog post. “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).”
Ryan goes over the various other ways in which SIE is committed to fighting climate change in the blog post, including what the company’s already done — see above — and what it will do. That includes reassessing its carbon footprint. There’s more details and numbers shared in the blog post, but that’s the gist of things.
What do you think of this new power-saving feature? Is it something you’d opt into using, do you think? Let us know in the comments, or hit me up directly on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk all things gaming!
The exact release date of the new PlayStation console has not been announced. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the upcoming device right here.
