Tbf I, as a software developer, find inefficient or unoptimized software to be unethical, as it worsens the problem of global warming by wasting electricity.
Take any triple A game, say it could be 20% more optimized with a month in the oven. Say 200,000 people play it for 4+ hours a day, and a patch is made as soon as possible (but the product needed released unoptimized).
We have wasted around 5 million compute-hours, which could be around 400 watts, so ~2 million kwh, or 2 gigawatts of electricity. That amount of electricity equates to about 52,000 gallons of gasoline. Now multiply that by every company that does the same thing, for every release…
(Math: 200,000 people x 4 hours x 20% (.2) = about 5 mill compute hours with rounding for the 4+ hours. 5 mill x 400 watts =~ 2 bill watts, 2 mill kilowatts, 2k megawatts, 2 gigawatt hours. 1 gallon of gasoline is about 33.7 kwh, so about 27,000 gallons for a gigawatt hour, we need two, 52000 gallons.)
There are always FTL, Noita, Slay the Spire, Hellcard, (the original) Cave Story, etc.
inb4 games are rated as “ethical” or not based on electricity usage
Tbf I, as a software developer, find inefficient or unoptimized software to be unethical, as it worsens the problem of global warming by wasting electricity.
Take any triple A game, say it could be 20% more optimized with a month in the oven. Say 200,000 people play it for 4+ hours a day, and a patch is made as soon as possible (but the product needed released unoptimized).
We have wasted around 5 million compute-hours, which could be around 400 watts, so ~2 million kwh, or 2 gigawatts of electricity. That amount of electricity equates to about 52,000 gallons of gasoline. Now multiply that by every company that does the same thing, for every release…
(Math: 200,000 people x 4 hours x 20% (.2) = about 5 mill compute hours with rounding for the 4+ hours. 5 mill x 400 watts =~ 2 bill watts, 2 mill kilowatts, 2k megawatts, 2 gigawatt hours. 1 gallon of gasoline is about 33.7 kwh, so about 27,000 gallons for a gigawatt hour, we need two, 52000 gallons.)
I really appreciate comments like these
Are you implying that that’d somehow be bad? Actually, that metric already exists: installation size!
True, but, sadly, I’m omnivorous and I like diversion in my game library.