Ready Player Green – A case study of sustainability in the Swedish games industry

Abstract: The video games industry is taking more sustainability responsibilities since video games can reach a broad and tremendous audience. Apart from adopting sustainable business strategies, games companies also need to navigate various stakeholders’ expectations and draft strategies to communicate with them. However, despite an abundance of corporate social responsibility literature, there is no existing research specifically focusing on how the video games industry can contribute to this topic. The social and environmental responsibilities of games companies are usually discussed separately. Therefore, this project aims to explain, in the video games industry, how social and environmental impacts are addressed in the form of corporate social responsibility and how companies meet stakeholders’ needs as a part of their sustainable business strategies. Six companies in the Swedish games industry were selected and interviewed. Together with the published sustainability reports, a theory-based content analysis was applied. The results indicate that games companies have mature strategies to tackle social impacts. For environmental impacts, on the contrary, there are no united strategies. The measures used to address environmental impacts vary from corporate to corporate due to the significant differences in business models. Besides publishing documents to communicate with stakeholders, games companies can also communicate sustainability via their games, which can be done by integrating sustainability in game mechanics or as an add-on feature. In conclusion, achieving a competitive advantage is the ultimate goal in engaging corporate social responsibility. Also, stakeholders’ expectations push companies to be more sustainable. Communicating sustainability via games may raise environmental awareness among the players; however, it might only apply to a specific group of people.