It’s a general practice among almost all gamers that they leave their gaming console/PC on standby mode rather than turning it off.

In the majority of cases, putting the device on standby is not necessary. People leave consoles on standby for whole nights and that is a waste of energy.

Even though the amount of energy used by your console is under a hundred watts when on standby but adding up all the consoles on standby becomes a pretty huge amount of energy that’s wasted for nothing.

However, Sony is planning to rectify this situation and has confirmed that the coming generation of their console, the PlayStation 5, will have a feature to significantly reduce the energy consumption while idling.

PlayStation made it public on their blog that they are going to work alongside the United Nations as a part of “Playing For The Panel” initiative, aimed at making gamers more environmentally friendly and aware of the climate change humans are triggering.

It’s not only the public or the gamers who are required to play their part in moving towards a more sustainable planet, the companies making stuff for them should also play their role.

Striving to decrease their own carbon footprint as far as possible, Sony is committed to reducing the power consumption of the upcoming PlayStation.

Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, wrote in a post on social media: “The next generation PlayStation console will include the possibility to suspend game play with much lower power consumption than PS4 (which we estimate can be achieved at around 0.5 W).

“If just one million users enable this feature, it would save equivalent to the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes.”

PlayStation was already trying to make its PS4 eco-friendlier.

Ryan added: “For context, we estimate the carbon emissions we have avoided to date already amount to almost 16m metric tons, increasing to 29m metric tons over the course of the next 10 years (which equals the CO2 emissions for the nation of Denmark in 2017).”

The gamers are a vast and diverse community and they can help a lot in the struggle of saving power and reducing carbon footprint.

Ryan further said: “There is an undeniable opportunity for leaders in the games industry to take a stand and support the UN Environment team by communicating the importance of preserving natural resources for generations to come.”

Taking into account the fact that Sony supplied more than 100 million PlayStations all over the world, the company’s dedication towards more environmentally responsible practices will make a positive change and will also encourage other companies to do it.

 

 

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