What is the carbon/material/environmental cost of loot boxes?
August 23, 2019 7:41 AM   Subscribe

This is a bit of a dumb question, but it comes up when trying to put an ethical question to loot boxes and other 'game currency/goods/services' vs irl counterpart discussions. Given the estimates for the carbon footprint of something like bitcoin, I realized I was out of my depth. Considering things like processing, hosting, even work hours lost or physical things like gift cards for STEAM and EPIC. Is there a way to quantify this, even broadly?

Interested to know what factors should be looked at, other than or in stead of the ones I mentioned.
posted by es_de_bah to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)
 
Best answer: Mining cryptocurrentcy uses a lot of energy because it requires a lot of hardware doing intensive computation on a sustained basis. Playing a game with loot boxes is no different, energy-wise, from playing a game without loot boxes. If you're already playing the game, the energy is being used no matter what; it doesn't really matter which lines of code are running.

Loot boxes are just glorified slot machines/pseudorandom number generators. There are plenty of reasons to oppose them ethically (eg, as you note in the tags, that they are essentially a form of gambling), but I don't think the energy consumption is really one of them.
posted by number9dream at 8:18 AM on August 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


I think number9dream has it largely correct, but I would add a slightly wider view. Loot boxes can only exist when games rely on secure connections to servers which do lots of the processing that clients used to do themselves. Years ago, a game would locally decide which items / options you had unlocked, and it wasn't that big a deal if you did some noodling around in the console to get things you weren't 'supposed' to have. But the lootbox model requires security, to ensure that the boxes are the only way to get the things. There certainly is going to be an extra amount of carbon overhead due to that, for reasons of 1. traffic, 2. server load, and 3. database administration. But I think it would be very hard indeed to separate the impact specifically due to lootboxes from the impact due to the nature of always-connected, server-intensive games which are the norm now.
posted by dbx at 8:24 AM on August 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


Response by poster: dbx, that's another interesting line, I suppose. How bad is the ubiquity of always-online for the environment, especially in the cases of games where it's unnecessary/detrimental to single player game play?
posted by es_de_bah at 9:34 AM on August 23, 2019


It’s not zero but it’s not like a percent of what bitcoin mining uses
posted by aubilenon at 9:47 AM on August 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Bitcoin (etc.) mining only uses enormous amounts of energy because it's an arms race - people add more equipment to try and get a bigger share of the pie, the algorithm adjusts the difficulty to compensate and keep things relatively fairly divided, and the cycle repeats - the current difficulty requires on the order of quadrillions of calculations per second globally to keep up, but if there was no reward for it and the calculations were only being done to run the network, a few standard PCs spread around the world would be enough (except now that there are high-speed custom microchips, there's no going back because just one specialty machine could swamp all those PCs and hijack control of the network).

Some other coins use a different method that doesn't require constant calculations to maintain, but there are other issues such as needing to already have some coins in order to make more (it's closer to "earning interest" in practice even though that's not actually what's happening) that disadvantage newcomers.

All the gift cards, in-game currencies, etc where the supply and processing is 100% controlled by a private entity, use no more power than running any other website with a database, because there are no endless crypto calculations needed to secure a public ledger against forgery. Even a private blockchain (where no one but the controlling entity is able to mine coins) can be done with very little footprint, because they aren't competing with anyone else.
posted by CyberSlug Labs at 1:54 PM on August 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


Best answer: Bitcoin is deliberately expensive, and importantly, is designed to stay that way even if miners throw huge amounts of computer power at it. It would be catastrophic for any one party to be able to monopolize the blockchain, so it's supposed to take an amount of computing that's infeasible for a single computer or even a server farm to produce.

Games are cheap, and their operators want them to have minimal operating costs. A loot crate is going to be a few operations in a database that flip a few bits on a disk. The details of that type of cost are obviously typically proprietary, but you can get an idea. Zynga was using 10,000 virtual servers to support 80 million players, so you'd have 8,000 players on a server that's probably running well under 500 watts, or 50 milliwatts per user. That's about the power use of a single LED light. Apple is using 4 gigawatts for it entire supply chain, for close to a billion users. So 4 watts per user, including all the manufacturing of the devices. That's about what a DVD player uses on standby. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of the environmental impact of games comes from the offices and commutes of the developers, artists, marketing people, etc.

I don't mean to minimize the environmental impact of tech. There are so many users that even small amounts become important at the scale of the whole planet. Just that individually the cost of an online game isn't that much (thank goodness).
posted by wnissen at 2:45 PM on August 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thanks to everyone who's chiming in. I knew this was a dumb question (or at least a question wrongly put) but I also hoped the answers would be illuminating to the non-tech-savvy. I'm glad how much it came thru on that end!
posted by es_de_bah at 8:08 PM on August 23, 2019


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