We all have heard of the new streaming services that have arisen, such as Google Stadia and the more recent Microsoft xCloud. The idea behind these is you have a gaming PC, without all the setups, or electrical bills, and you pay a monthly subscription to run the PC. It’s like having a computer over the internet.
However, a recent study from Lancaster University suggests that if gamers and streamers moved over to streaming games, there could be a 30% increase in carbon emissions.
This is caused by the increased power usage that the servers use to run the games. Considering that every person who uses these platform is using a server with similar statistics to a high-end PC, that would mean every person using the service would be using a higher amount of power, as opposed to if they had their own PCs.
The internet itself also uses a lot of power – the laying of miles of fibre-optic cables, the routers that go to the homes and the big power-drinking data centres, all involving hundreds, possibly thousands of computers.
So… what’s the big issue? There isn’t enough carbon-neutral energy that can be sourced to solve this problem. Centres like this use the amount of energy it would take to power an average road of houses in a day, and there are hundreds of these centres around the world. Streaming centres like this, unfortunately, could accelerate the pace of climate change. Nevertheless, it's still great to spend a Friday evening playing video games, over the cloud, or safe in your homes.
