The Quest for Sustainability at Xbox

I was blown away after recently learning that a single line of code resulted in additional 10-15% power savings during certain game play scenarios in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, one of our most popular Xbox experiences. Scaled across the 3 billion people who play video games globally, small improvements like this can have substantial impact. One of Microsoft’s goals is to have sustainability be a part of our business decisions, and seeing how sustainability is part of our gaming division is exciting.    

Our gaming division is one of the most innovative groups for sustainability at the company. Each time we convene leaders from across Microsoft for our quarterly Climate Council meetings, where we track progress toward our 2030 goals, I am struck by the creativity and focus their team brings to the conversation. From cloud infrastructure to hardware engineering to game design, the gaming team demonstrates a focus around incorporating sustainability into gaming technology.  

In November, I had the chance to attend the 3rd annual Xbox Sustainafest, an internal summit that attracted 150+ colleagues and focused on strengthening collaboration around gaming’s climate impact. I had many conversations not only about the measures being taken to reduce the environmental footprint of gaming, but also about how gaming itself is emerging as a powerful informative tool, with developers integrating climate themes such as biodiversity and resource scarcity into gameplay.    

While at the event, I had the privilege of joining Dave McCarthy, COO of Microsoft Gaming, for a fireside chat, where we discussed how to make sustainability an integral part of delivering the world-class games that players love. 

I’ve now invited Dave to elaborate on the approaches the gaming division is using to engage employees and partners in shaping our shared sustainable future, while continuing to create outstanding gaming experiences.  

This year’s Xbox Sustainafest brought together colleagues from across our diverse organization—Studios, Platform Services, and Hardware—to inspire and learn from one another. We launched our first Sustainafest Awards, a milestone in celebrating the individuals setting the standards of sustainability in gaming. This new tradition reflects our broader mission at Xbox of supporting designers and engineers in embedding sustainability into every aspect of game development. 

We celebrated industry-leading achievements from our platform teams, including advances in energy-saving modes, and expanding repairability and recyclable packaging—setting the stage for how creativity and innovation drive sustainability at Xbox. 

Our portfolio of world-class games creates another exciting avenue to help realize our sustainability ambitions, complementing the foundational work across our platforms and services. 

This year at Sustainafest, we celebrated game teams whose titles earned awards for leadership in sustainability. Beyond these award winners, we’re also proud of additional game teams and titles that have driven impactful innovations on our sustainability journey. 

• 🌿Call of Duty: Black Ops 6: At the Green Games Summit in November, one of Xbox’s most popular games, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, won the "Best Green Tech" award for its innovative new features, including an Eco Mode preset that adjusts rendering settings. 
• 👑The Elder Scrolls: By capping the frame rate to 30 frames per second when certain menus are open and the game is in Performance Mode, Elder Scrolls Online reduced power consumption by approximately 50% without impacting the player experience.  
• 🌊Minecraft Ocean Heroes: Launched in June 2025 in collaboration with UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), Ocean Heroes invites players on an immersive marine conservation adventure. Through interactive ocean restoration missions, users learn about core scientific principles like biodiversity and ecosystem interconnectivity. 
• 🌎No Place Like Home: This game takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, where players must work to clean up and restore Earth to its natural state. In-game challenges are designed to educate users about sustainable practices, such as managing a farm with limited resources and recycled materials. 

As part of our journey, we’ve helped enable innovation through the introduction of our Xbox Sustainability Toolkit—a suite of resources designed to help developers build more energy efficient games. Here are the core principles behind the Toolkit: 

• 🛠️Sustainable by Design: Integrating sustainability holistically into every new product and initiative from the earliest stages of production, ensuring that climate and environmental considerations are a default part of how we innovate and build.  
• 💻Optimization: Enabling optimizations that reduce the global energy footprint across millions of devices while remaining invisible to players. These improvements help make sustainability a seamless part of creating great games without compromising performance or experience.  
• ♻️Lifecycle Management: Overseeing products from creation to disposal to maximize performance and circularity. This can be done by designing hardware components for easier repair or recycling, and extending the lifespan of devices through ongoing software updates that allow players to use their consoles for a longer period of time.  
• 📈Measurement: Using data and analytics to evaluate and continually improve environmental impact, for example, by tracking the energy demand and global energy footprint of individual games, scenarios, and experiences, for improvement opportunities.  
• 🌻Advocacy: Engaging players, creators, and partners through meaningful, educational world-building. Climate themes such as ecosystem restoration and resource efficiency can be integrated into the player experience through in-game challenges, quests, and storytelling, raising awareness of real-life environmental threats. 

As we look ahead, these core principles will shape how we continue to grow our impact, laying the groundwork for future innovations. We’re excited to continue this journey and invite game developers to share their experiences with sustainability and optimization in the comments below.   

• Read about the work of our Gaming Division in the Microsoft Sustainability Report   
• Explore how the Xbox Sustainability Toolkit is building a greener gaming industry 
• Learn more about Minecraft’s Greening Education partnership with UNESCO