When it comes to talking about the next generation of consoles, the things we all talk about is the sexy stuff. Things like new graphics, processing power, SSD HDDs, or whatever. Power consumption probably is the last thing on your mind, but Sony seems to be thinking about it. The company joined forces with the UN Climate Summit and said the PS5 will have an option for conserving power.
The company announced they would be partnering with Playing for the Planet, an alliance of several video game companies to try and create ecosystem friendly options on their machines. CEO Jim Ryan said that the next PlayStation will have an option that will allow the system to suspend gameplay with a very low power consumption of only 0.5 W. That’s significantly less than what the current systems use. Microsoft is also part of the alliance, but they made no statement about the next Xbox.
“I am also very pleased to announce the next generation PlayStation console will include the possibility to suspend gameplay with much lower power consumption than PS4 (which we estimate can be achieved at around 0.5 W). If just one million users enable this feature, it would save equivalent to the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes.”
Most of the time these things are empty gestures and cheap PR stunts, so whether it will really matter in the end, who knows. The option is there, however, for those who care, but honestly, most probably don’t.
