Xbox Touts Its Carbon Reduction Successes

Microsoft’s Xbox business today said that it has made meaningful progress towards achieving its carbon reduction commitments in just three years: Thanks to reduced energy consumption in its video game consoles, it has prevented the release of over 1.2 million metric tons of CO2e, the equivalent of preventing over 3 billion car miles (driven by an average gasoline-powered passenger vehicle) being released into the atmosphere.

“Microsoft has set ambitious commitments to meaningfully reduce our environmental impact and become a carbon negative, water positive and zero waste company by 2030, [and] Xbox plays an important role in achieving this,” Xbox director of sustainability Trista Patterson writes. “Xbox has contributed to this goal with interventions that include greening game code–with game developers leveraging the Xbox Sustainability Toolkit–and players opting in to using the Shutdown (energy saving) power option, active hours, and carbon aware updates on Xbox consoles.”

The Xbox Sustainability Toolkit has been implemented across 343 Industries (while making Halo Infinite), Activision (starting with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Call of Duty: Warzone), and many others. And with ongoing improvements, including a new Dynamic Power States API that shipped this past June, it hopes to see further improvements going forward.

But new power management functionality has contributed even more. Microsoft introduced carbon-aware game downloads and updates to Xbox in 2023, a new Shutdown (energy saving) power option that reduces power consumption while the console is turned off and can cut power use by up to 20X when compared to Sleep, and the active hours energy setting.

You can learn more on the Xbox website.