As part of Earth Day 2024, Microsoft has broken down a number of new initiatives going on at Xbox right now - including a brand-new "solar-powered studio" at Sea Of Thieves developer Rare.
This new studio, also known as 'Barn X', opened last year - and it's since been "certified LEED GOLD for its design and construction". To put it simply, the new barn has been designed from the ground up to be environmentally friendly; being mass-timber built and featuring 480 solar panels that provide lots of power to the building.
Here's what Rare studio head Craig Duncan had to say about the barn, which was started back in 2020:
"Our new barn is a demonstration of leading-edge sustainability and environmental design, creating a model green workplace. The opportunity to expand our campus by building a state-of-the-art environment for our teams while supporting Microsoft to achieve its sustainability goals has been genuinely rewarding.
The new space design promotes collaboration, creativity and wellbeing, which are essential ingredients for a team to create fun experiences for players everywhere."
Xbox's Earth Day 2024 blog post also goes over a number of other initiatives going on right now, including the recently-released 'Remix' controller, the team's console energy saving features, a developer 'Sustainability Toolkit' and lots more.
These moves stretch to the games themselves as well. Minecraft is involved in its own education program relating to the BBC's 'Planet Earth' series, while Team Green has also namedropped Lightyear Frontier, Coral Island and Stardew Valley as just a few Xbox titles that enable players to "explore games with environmental themes on Game Pass".
The team has some lofty goals when it comes to being more environmentally-friendly — including Microsoft becoming 'carbon negative' by 2030 — and it's making sure that any current and future moves bear this in mind too. The team mentions Activision Blizzard King right at the end of its blog post, saying that it's "excited to welcome one of America’s Greenest Companies 2024, to Team Xbox".
Excited to see how Xbox's dev teams evolve in future? Drop your thoughts on all of this down below.
[source news.xbox.com]
Comments 6
This commitment to Sustainability is what I think will leave Physical media and potentially even physical 'boxes' relegated to the annals of history.
Physical media is plastics as well as all the Distribution emissions from shipping these globally. Digital supply cuts out all those and won't end up in a Landfill.
The Hardware too is Plastics and other Raw materials like Silicon. These have a 'shelf' life and become dated/obsolete. Many will end up in Landfill or sent overseas for dismantling and/or recovery/recycling of raw materials. If they can get more people playing on '3rd Party' Hardware - from streaming to a Display to downloading and playing on a PC for example, then its beneficial to MS's environmental push.
Fewer/No Physical media or their 'own' dedicated Hardware, better Sustainability and Carbon footprint. Sell 100m Consoles, that will have a MUCH larger 'negative' impact on Environment, Sustainability etc than 20m - as long as you still have those '100m' in your ecosystem still spending money on your games, services etc.
Nice, I wanna live in a place like that with solar powers.
That'll be a fantastic place to work on the four days of British sunshine.
note I know that's not how it works
So Rare's just a bunch of hippies.
How about Rare actually gives an update on Everwild instead?
@Johnnel
Remember how Naughty Dog didnt want to be a studio entirely dedicated to running Factions, a live service game... and they said it would be impossible for them to actually make other future games while maintaining Factions at the same time.
Well yeah, Sea of Thieves is where Factions prayed and hoped to ever get to as far as engagement, hitting over 40 million before the PS launch. So I imagine Everwild is not something we are going to see as soon as we hoped seeing as it had to go through a full rework, while the team has been making regular game updates to SoT.
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