Rich Hilleman and David Helgason have helped shape the video game industry. Now they want to offset its environmental impact with CleanPlay.

More than just a startup, CleanPlay is on a mission to rapidly and dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of the video game industry. Hilleman is the former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, while Helgason was the former CEO and cofounder of the Unity game engine.

They said they have seen gaming evolve over 30 years from a geeky hobby into one of the largest communities on the planet. Today the community of gaming is vast, diverse, and a wonderful space where the connections between creators and players extend far beyond entertainment.

In parallel, climate change has emerged as the defining challenge of our era, impacting every person on earth – gamers and non-gamers alike, they said.

“We embarked on a journey to understand the intersection of climate and gaming, delving into the CO2 emissions of the videogames industry. Although gaming is relatively low in carbon intensity compared to revenue, its total emissions are significant and growing,” Hilleman and Helgason said.

Current estimates suggest that the gaming industry is nearing 100 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually, roughly equivalent to the emissions from 20 million passenger cars or deforestation of 80,000 square miles (nearly Great Britain’s size). Notably, 80% of console emissions come from players’ electricity consumption, with gaming making up 1% of U.S. household energy consumption.

How CleanPlay works

That’s where CleanPlay comes in. CleanPlay empowers players to take simple and immediate climate action while enjoying their favorite games – and to get rewarded in the process.

Partnering with game developers, publishers, and platform holders, CleanPlay is inviting the majority of gamers who already feel a personal responsibility to combat climate change to join the cause. Through the CleanPlay app – launching first on PlayStation 5 – CleanPlay aims to ensure that every watt of energy used while gaming is matched with clean energy.

The company is using verified tools today and it is also engaging the community to pursue even more impactful solutions for reducing CO2 emissions and driving the clean energy transition in gaming.

As the gaming industry continues to expand, the energy demand will be far greater than most anticipate in the coming years. That’s why ensuring the quality and integrity of the clean energy solution is CleanPlay’s top priority.

The company is working closely with sustainability experts to carefully select clean energy projects that not only meet this growing demand but also make a real impact on driving clean energy adoption.

Transparency and rigorous tracking are embedded in every step the company takes, ensuring that CleanPlay’s contributions to clean energy are both meaningful and measurable, the company said.

Moreover, CleanPlay offers a way to transform sustainability efforts into a revenue-generating opportunity for gaming companies. The platform empowers entire teams – from game designers, developers, and publishers to financial and sustainability leaders – to seamlessly integrate clean energy into their operations, creating an economically rewarding model that offers new monetization opportunities, enhanced player engagement, and increased loyalty.

By incorporating in-game features and reward systems tied to clean energy actions, we’re delivering value that resonates with eco-conscious gamers and helping industry partners realign their strategies, ultimately turning environmental action into a powerful driver of profitability and long-term success.

The gaming community, with its proactive, passionate, and agile members, is ideal to lead the charge in community-driven demand for CO2 reductions, and will create a roadmap for other industries to rapidly improve, CleanPay said.

Activities

Gamers can engage in up to 1,000 hours of eco-conscious play, annually, matched by clean energy. The gamers can also access to hand-picked gaming premiums, enhancing playing experience with exceptional content. They can also connect with like-minded players at exclusive community events, designed to unite and inspire.

Gamers can also join influencer sessions led by prominent gaming influencers, offering unique gameplay experiences and insider tips. And they can get exclusive offers on games and content, benefiting from special offers tailored to support sustainable gaming practices.

Right now, only about 20% of electricity generated in the U.S. comes from renewable sources. That’s not enough, CleanPlay said.

“We are focused on increasing the proportion of clean energy on the grid, and we’re looking to drive real impact through the gaming community,” CleanPlay said. “At launch, we’re starting by purchasing high-integrity Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) while exploring options like Virtual Power Purchase Agreements (VPPAs), community solar subscriptions, and direct investment into new projects and technologies (we like thinking about tidal energy, hydrogen fuel cells, and nuclear fusion, don’t you?). We also support efforts like 24/7 accounting and granular certificates.”

Origins

Helgason was the former CEO and cofounder of Unity, the game engine company. He started it in 2004 and focused on making a game engine for mobile games, expanding it later on to compete head-on with Epic Games’ Unreal engine. He stepped aside as CEO in 2014.

The firm went public in the go-go pre-pandemic days in 2020 at a valuation of $13.7 billion, and Helgason became wealthy. He started a venture fund in 2021.

“As you know, I used to be quite active in the games industry, but then years ago, I decided to spend most of my energy on cleantech,” said Helgason, in an interview with GamesBeat. “I’ve been investing into technology solutions for many years, both software and hardware, into synthetic biology and batteries and all this stuff. That’s really fun.”

But he also saw playing games as part of the problem, as game consoles, PCs, and mobile devices all use energy.

“It occured to me that we could harness that somehow, to be part of a solution,” Helgason said.

He connected with Hilleman, who had spent decades at Electronic Arts building franchises like Madden NFL Football and EA Sports. Hilleman joined EA in 1982 as employee No. 39. Hilleman eventually became chief creative officer of EA, and he retired in 2016. He took an interest in clean energy and started designing electric cars for racing such as the Blackbird.

“When David gave me the challenge, the part that got me interested was not solving the carbon footprint for the business. That’s a relevant thing, but it was providing leverage to show other businesses how to do it, how to involve their customers in the process, how to use the kind of techniques that we’re going to use to reward them for the things that they do right, have it to inform them when they’re not,” Hilleman said. “The real opportunity here, one of the most powerful things that we have found, is that the clean power industry has an excess of capacity that they’re having a hard time delivering to the extent that they’re paying three and four figure fees to get access to customers with any hope of closing them.”

Helgason caught up with his mentor Hilleman during the spring of 2021. Hilleman was busy designing four different EV race cars. But Helgason waited until the off season and they brainstormed again.

“Rich was a systemic thinker,” Helgason said. “The publishers were starting to talk about having goals” for the environment. One paper written around the time was about how to optimize code for power utilization on an Xbox game console. Microsoft did a similar paper about running the game Halo.

“Once I had those numbers, I could start to really figure out what the real problem was,” Helgason said, at least as far as the consoles go. Given the consumption numbers, Helgason realized that the efforts of the publishers and players weren’t really addressing the real environmental problems. he called a friend at Sony and started thinking about it more.

A big idea

He thought that the platform company should sell carbon mitigation as part of the company’s primary subscription for online play for the game console.

“That’s where the notion came — which is, hey, why don’t we be in that business? And why don’t we be in that business in a way that’s more imaginative than a console player can be, and that we can extend it with other platforms,” Helgason said.

“Our goal is to meet the need, put it on whatever platform, in an appropriate way. We’re starting on the console first because we have three really variable characters,” Hilleman said.

He noted that PCs may run on as low as 35 watts (or up to 400 for a gamer PC) while consoles were running on 200 watts. The team of a few people created an application with the option to purchase carbon-free energy for your game console.

“We purchase carbon free energy in some fashion and add it to the grid. The effect of that is to try to erase the carbon footprint of that particular individual once they’ve made that choice, then we try to share a couple of key pieces of information with them,” Hilleman said. “We have a reasonable model. This is the second positive characteristic of consoles — they’re very homogeneous, meaning they’re all the same, all about the same power profile, which makes all of that stuff easy to model and predict, because we currently do not have on platform metering.”

So CleanPlay can inform a player of their power consumption and how much of it is being offset. Players have options like buying a renewable energy certificate that supports clean energy power plants.

A subscription service

The subscription price isn’t set yet, but Hilleman believes it will be under $20. As for cloud games, much of the computing and electricity is used in internet-connected data centers. Big cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are offering aggressive plans to rein in their power requirements.

Hilleman said he wishes every party involved in power usage, from AI companies on down, would to a better job of understanding and disclosing their power utilization. Since that isn’t happening, customers have no idea how much power they’re using. If they did, they might make different choices, Hilleman said.

“That’s the core of what we’re about,” Hilleman said. “We see all of the platforms (for power usage) as an opportunity. The key thing that I think distinguishes us from the other people in the space is that we think customers want to be a part of it, and we think that if we give them that choice, that they’re not only going to take it, but they’re going to make us smarter by it.”

Hilleman hopes he can get 10% of video game players to join the cause, and that could actually mitigate the entire carbon footprint of the game business, he said. Gamers can be part of the solution, but so far they have never been asked to help, he said. Hilleman said he appreciates the efforts on every side where game companies and gamers are trying to go green, but he worries the effort is too small.

“Nobody should be pointing fingers at anyone else,” Hilleman said.

Hilleman thinks that measurement of energy consumption, and showing how it’s changing, will be important in convincing gamers to stay the course, as it will cost them money. But Hilleman also believes it’s important to incentivize people by giving them gifts. Those can come from publishers.

The application for the consoles is done. It’s possible for the company to ship this year. As for Unity, Helgason hopes game engines can be part of the solution in the future by making it easier to do metering of electricity usage while gaming.