Physical games are worse for the environment than digital ones. This will almost certainly not surprise you. What might shock you is how much more damage you do to the planet when you decide to buy a physical copy of a new game than its digital equivalent.
A study by carbon accounting company Greenly, titled The Carbon Footprint of Gaming and shared by GamesIndustry.biz, revealed that physical games are more than 100 times worse for the planet than digital games. This is due to the production of the materials needed to make them and the shipping needed to ship these games around the world.
Each physical game contributes the same amount of CO2 as 100 digital ones
The study estimates that the production of one million discs generates a staggering 312 tons of carbon dioxide. In comparison, the production process needed to produce one million digital games only produces three, and therefore the report concluded that physical games are more than 100 times worse for the planet than digital releases.
You might think that digital gaming produces no emissions at all, but that's not entirely true. The three tons for every million games downloaded is mainly due to the electricity needed to power the data servers from which you download the games. Not to mention the extra energy you'll use at home downloading the game.
However, as the numbers show, the environmental impact of a digital game is nowhere near what physical games have on the planet. As the report also points out, there's no further risk of contributing to the planet's growing landfill problems if you shop digitally, while millions of discs and the plastic packaging they're sold in end up in landfills over the years.
You might think that the implication of all this is that, even though we may not want to, we should all ditch physical games and buy exclusively from digital stores instead, but that's not the case. The message Greenly wants to drive home through his findings is that we, the consumers, and perhaps more importantly, the studios that make the games, should make a concerted effort to revive the second-hand game market.
Unfortunately, the rise of game cards, and in some cases physical releases that don't include a copy of the game at all, has hurt the second-hand video game market. If your card contains a one-time download or the servers your disc needs to download are no longer active, this physical game cannot be sold because whoever buys it will not have access to the game. That almost certainly won't change. A more likely ending is that, like movies and music, physical video game releases become increasingly rare until they eventually cease to exist.
