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We discuss when gamers will destroy the planet

Much of the responsibility lies at the feet of the games industry itself, especially MMOG hosts. A 2007 survey entitled “Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers in the US and the World” revealed that online servers account for 1.2% of all power consumption in the US and 0.8% worldwide.

“Blizzard is rumored to have 500 servers for World of Warcraft alone,” says Wand. “Add in all the other titles, all the other genres, add in the games-mad Koreans, then consider that a fully occupied server will be using more power than a color TV, and you have some serious power slurping going on. And that’s before you consider the millions of people actually playing the games at the other end.”