New tool kit measures Xbox’s electricity use
How much energy does it take to play Xbox? Microsoft is helping developers find out. At the 2023 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the company announced a new tool kit for developers to measure realtime energy consumption from Xbox games.
The tool kit, which Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft calls the first of its kind in the industry, will allow developers using the Xbox platform to monitor realtime energy use of the games they create — “down to the nearest millisecond,” the company noted in a news release. It will also help Microsoft establish a baseline for Xbox games, which could then serve as a benchmark for developers. The company hopes game-makers will also leverage the tool kit to experiment with approaches that
reduce energy consumption.
“With a potential reach of over 3.1 billion players worldwide, game creators undoubtedly have potential to have a positive impact,” Microsoft said in the release. “These resources are designed to empower and
enable developers to understand energy usage in their games and incorporate efficient strategies to help reduce the carbon impact of games.” The tool kit will include, for example, energy consumption averages for game areas like static menus and loading screens.
Some 60 years after the debut of the world’s first video game, the industry has grown into a $214 billion global juggernaut. With that growth comes an increased environmental impact — but one that can be difficult to quantify with precision, particularly as it varies widely by console, game and system setup.
Benjamin Abraham, a gaming decarbonization advocate at Sydney-based consultancy AfterClimate, calls the Microsoft tool kit “quite a significant achievement” if it can show developers energy consumption in real time. “(Having) actual direct measurement and in real time could be a critical enabler of a whole host of climate-positive interventions,” he said.
Video games’ climate footprint starts with the tens of millions of consoles, cartridges and discs manufactured each year and shipped around the world.
But gameplay itself can also be energy-intensive: In one of few attempts to assess its energy consumption, a 2019 peer-reviewed study estimated that American gamers collectively use up to 34 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. That’s more than the country’s largest nuclear power plant, the Palo Verde station, produces in one year.
The new tool kit is the latest in a series of efforts made by gaming companies to mitigate their environmental impact. Japanese conglomerate Nintendo says the power demand of its current Switch console is half that of the model released in 2017. Sony said in November that its latest PlayStation 5 uses 17 percent less energy than the PS4. And Microsoft, for its part, rolled out automatic energy-saving mode earlier this year for select Xbox users, which reduces power consumption while the console is off.