This overview presents the industry’s current best practices, tools, and expert discussions on optimizing energy efficiency, based on input from SGA members and the global SGA Energy Efficiency Network, including experts and findings of Microsoft, Unreal, Unity, Deck13, Ubisoft, Nitro Games and GOALS.
Improving the player experience, especially on handheld devices
Other possible perks for your studio
These plugins dynamically detect when players become idle and enable developers to integrate automatic energy-saving modes across the most widely used engines.
After predefined thresholds, they reduce frame rate and rendering resolution, and in longer idle states can even temporarily disable rendering entirely. Once the player provides input, the game immediately returns to normal settings.
Huge thanks to the makers of the plugins: Hauke Thießen, Oliver Stock and Ashe Foltin.
These plugins can help you reduce energy consumption when the player is idle, and extend playtime on battery-powered platforms by up to 15%.
This guide offers a detailed overview of the industry’s current best practices and developer input on optimizing energy efficiency.
The cheat sheet is a great starting point to making your game more energy efficient.
To support studios in implementing these practices, SGA offers Energy Efficiency Workshops covering
Studios can engage through short consulting sessions or deeper implementation projects, depending on their needs and availability. Whether you invest two hours or two days, there are practical steps every studio can take to reduce the energy footprint of their games.
Join the industry experts Gabriel Lascano, the CTO of SYBO, Jiri Kupiainen, Founder and Chair of SGA and Laurent Gibert, Director of Product Management & Studio Lead of Unity Montreal online, exploring how energy efficiency is becoming a powerful competitive advantage in modern game development. Featuring Subway Surfers City as a case study, they unpack how scaling strategies can significantly boost performance while optimizing resource use.
This meetup gives participants concrete insights into current industry best practices for optimizing energy efficiency of their Unity games. Extending the lifetime of players’ hardware, reducing their energy bills, extending battery life for their games on battery-powered devices. There is an introduction of the Power Saving Plugin for Unity, a presentation about energy efficiency in Tiny Bookstore, and a panel hosted by folks from Take-Two Interactive Software and Unity Technologies.
This session focuses on the Power-Saving Godot Plugin by Ashe Foltin (Co-Founder and Creative Director of Bold Beetle Games), developed to optimize your game’s energy efficiency in a pragmatic and time-efficient way—without compromising the player experience. In fact, these optimizations can even enhance the player experience by improving battery life, making them a benefit for developers.
This session focuses on the Power-Saving Unreal Plugin by Hauke Thießen (Technical Artist at Deck 13 Interactive), developed to optimize your game’s energy efficiency in a pragmatic and time-efficient way—without compromising the player experience. In fact, these optimizations can even enhance the player experience by improving battery life, reducing heat-induced slowdowns, and minimizing fan noise, making them a benefit for developers.
Game performance optimization is usually driven by player experience and cost efficiency, but the same strategies can also deliver significant environmental benefits. In this talk, Torbjörn Söderman, Technical Director at GOALS will present the “4P Strategy” – Performance, Player Experience, Profit, and Power – and show how a combined focus makes optimization a true win-win.
Ari Arnbjörnsson, Technical Developer Relations at Epic Games, Hauke Thießen, Technical Artist at DECK 13 Interactive GmbH and Jyrki Coertjens, Lead Technical Artist at Nitro Games discuss Energy Efficiency and Player Experience.
This SGA seminar was jointly organized with Unity Montréal and Collège LaSalle Montréal. Starting with an opening note from Laurent Gibert, Co-Lead, Unity Montréal, followed by Dr. Ben Abraham, Research & Standards Lead of the Sustainable Games Alliance this seminar explores examples from some of the largest game developers in the world, who have already saved a million or more tonnes of CO2 through software efficiency, and what small teams of developers with limited means have managed to do as well.
You want to learn from the best and technically optimize your PC, console, and/or mobile game? Ubisoft and Microsoft share their case studies on how they have technically optimised their games to reduce the power consumption and hardware load of their games without compromising their players’ experiences.
This session is all about optimizing energy efficiency of your game in a pragmatic and time efficient way without impairing the player experience. Some of the discussed optimizations can even improve the player experience by improving battery life, reducing heat-induced slowdowns, and reducing fan noise, making them not just a burden for developers.
The SGA Energy Efficiency Network was born out of highly attended SGA Energy Efficiency meetups and workshops, where companies such as Microsoft, Unreal, Unity, Deck 13, Ubisoft, Nitro Games, and GOALS shared their best practices, tools, and ideas on how to optimize the energy efficiency of games and improve player experience.
It is a global network of game development professionals committed to advancing the reduction of the environmental impact of gameplay systemically while optimizing game performance, player experience, and cost efficiency.
The network shares best practices through quarterly meetups and drives the development of game development tools and features that improve energy efficiency and player experience.