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.
Energy Measurement in the Backend of Engines
Aimed at providing developers with information about energy usage in their daily work with game engines.
Whitepaper on mid-gameplay power measurement on PC and console
Showing the benefits and practical steps of measuring power during gameplay for managing the end-user experience, based on the actual experience with the game GOALS. This includes advice on where and how to implement these optimisations, what techniques are best to use to control wasted heat and electricity, and what the other co-benefits are for companies (reducing Scope 3.11 end user emissions).
Testing, Advancing and Promoting Energy Saving Plugins
Hauke Thießen, Ashe Foltin and Oliver Stock wrote Energy Saving Plugins for (Unreal, Godot and Unity) that adjust rendering settings to save energy when no player input is registered. The idea is to have plugins that can be just added to a project without having to implement these optimizations again and again for each game separately. Right now, it’s quite simple and borrows heavily from the implementation of Epic’s paper about energy optimization in Fortnite, just with a few additional settings, and the option to disable rendering completely.
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.
The network shares best practices through meetups and drives the development of game development tools and features that improve energy efficiency and player experience. Meetups occur about once a month and are announced via newsletter, LinkedIn and Discord. All meetups are recorded and posted in the archive.
Torbjörn is the Technical Director of GOALS, Former Head of Technology at Toca Boca/Spin Master Digital, Studio Director at King, Senior Technical Director at DICE. He helped ship Battlefield3, Battlefield 4, Battlefield 1 and Mirror's Edge Catalyst. Was responsible for both vision and technology, ranging from Gen4 specific features Kinect, Companion Apps to online technology and making sure the game ran at 60 fps with 64 players on the Gen 4 consoles (XBOX One and PS4).
Hauke is a Technical Artist at Deck 13, currently working on an unannounced project. He previously worked on several VR projects and for Limbic Entertainment on the theme park game Park Beyond. His main responsibility is ensuring the game artists' vision shines and runs smoothly on every supported platform.
Ashe Foltin is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Bold Beetle Games, currently working on the Physics-Platformer Dung Slinger. They started working on Games at 13 years old, creating mods and unreleased games of various sizes. The game that led them to found a studio started as a student project, got nominated at the German Developer Awards and received state funding. As a game developer of the next generation, they have an active interest in making the Games Industry sustainable, because if they don’t care nobody else will.