Forward-looking Business: SDGs in Games

With the increasing onset of global crises, a growing sense of urgency is evident across political agendas, civil society initiatives, national and European regulations for the development and implementation of impactful solutions. While the call for action stems from both top-down and bottom-up demands, collective awareness must now be matched by clear prioritization and a deeper understanding of practical, actionable measures within society and industry. For many businesses, minimising their environmental impact remains the most tangible and immediate way to contribute to sustainability. For the games industry, however, the potential scope of contribution is a lot larger and the opportunities for sustainable game creation are manifold and go way beyond reducing a studio’s carbon footprint. Within the industry, there is a steadily growing effort to discover and develop methods to contribute to environmental sustainability and social fairness. But as with the political volition and societal action, there still remains a big gap. Given the industry’s vast potential to drive meaningful change, it is crucial to engage all stakeholders and foster a collective commitment to sustainability—ensuring that game developers, publishers, and industry leaders recognize and embrace their role in shaping a more sustainable future.
With this forward-looking perspective toward the next generation of the game business, the Sustainability Nexus strategy aims to bridge the gap between the individual sustainable game expert groups and the whole game industry, to foster a sense of societal responsibility within the industry, encouraging contributions to the SDGs that go beyond mere legal compliance and fully leverage the industry’s potential for positive impact. The objective is, thus, to connect and amplify the work of sustainability advocates in the gaming sector, particularly in Europe, by increasing visibility for their insights, initiatives, and innovations. At the same time, the endeavour is to reach out to game developers to encourage and inspire them to engrain sustainable responsibility into their daily work. to connect and amplify the work of sustainability advocates in the gaming sector, particularly in Europe, by increasing visibility for their insights, initiatives, and innovations. Driven by the goal of promoting a resilient game industry, the starting and growing companies are the most vulnerable in many respects. In the perspective taken with BSG Go!, it is about preparing these groups for meeting demands of future and sustainable business expectations and requirements. With their limited resources – money and time – they tend to consider sustainability issues to be something “nice-to-do” rather than “must do” priority.
In 2023, 2024 and 2025, BSG Go! and the French-German accelerator Spielfabrique joined forces in reaching out to the community of game developers, in particular the young talents, emerging studios, and Indie studios. Spielfabrique, in line with their remit as accelerator, envisaged targeting specifically Indie studios, and BSG Go! in line with their mission to foster a resilient game business support ecosystem, sought to get hubs and mentors interested. Eventually, both had to recognise that their first attempts attracted those already interested in promoting sustainability in the game industry. On the positive side, we soon came to understand that these interested persons are best placed to form the “bridge” to our desired target groups, as they have their own networks and communities in which they carry some weight and are actively promoting sustainable goals.
With our three pilot events, of which two were conferences, hybrid with on-site break-out sessions in different locations (Berlin, Malmö, Cologne, Stockholm) and one was a dedicated workshop on sustainability in game development, we succeeded in initiating a community of sustainable practice in the European game industry.

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