Game Studios on Player Trends Driving Growth and Environmental Impact
Lisa Pak, Project Lead for Playing for the Planet, and Hommy Yang, Game Operations Director at Tencent Games, talked with us about how game studios can also get involved in environmental impact, encouraging people to learn more about the planet.
Can you tell us how the Playing for the Planet initiative was originally conceived and how the Green Game Jam has helped promote environmental awareness through game design?
Lisa Pak: Playing for the Planet was founded at the UN level. It launched in September 2019 at UN Headquarters in New York during the UN Secretary‑General's Climate Action Summit, after UNEP brought together industry leaders like Jim Ryan and Phil Spencer in response to the first UN report on how games could contribute to climate action.
Since then, it has grown into an Alliance of over 50 game businesses, trade bodies, and industry groups, all focused on activating players to protect and restore our planet whilst accelerating decarbonisation across the video games industry. Within that, the Green Game Jam has become the initiative's most visible vehicle for promoting environmental awareness through game design.
It challenges studios to build in‑game content using familiar mechanics such as events and quests to tell environmental stories in live games. This way, players encounter nature‑themed content that feels native to their favourite titles rather than bolted on or "preachy."
By doing this across large games with an audience of millions of players, the Green Game Jam both showcases meaningful environmental impact and demonstrates the commercial value of engaging audiences with climate and nature themes in a way that fits the game's existing world.
How is Playing for the Planet empowering developers to take action on the environment and what are some of the success stories from the initiative?
Lisa: Playing for the Planet empowers developers in several ways: by building a collaborative membership community, by providing guidance and resources around sustainability and decarbonisation, and through the annual Green Game Jam. The Alliance is deliberately structured around collaboration and knowledge‑sharing, with peers learning from peers, empowering them to share best practices and guidance, and implement ideas that can then be replicated or adapted across the sector.
The Green Game Jam might look like "small tweaks" to seasonal content, but it is prompting deeper shifts in how art and game design leads make creative choices, with evidence of business uplift in case studies such as Wooga's June's Journey. We've had great success with the Green Game Jam in terms of engagement, both with studios and players.
The number of games joining the Green Game Jam increases, leading to almost 60 games participating this year, and together they engage over 100 million daily active users with their content. Our Carbon Calculator is a validated, user-friendly carbon accounting tool which has been built with and for studios, publishers, and other games industry organisations. It enables organisations to measure emissions in alignment with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and highlights the emissions in need of greatest attention.
Our Game Studio's Guide to Net Zero Targets enables members and games industry businesses alike to navigate the process of setting credible Net Zero targets. It aims to support studios no matter where they are on their journey. Finally, we're looking forward to launching some new guidance centered on climate narratives this month!
From a game operations perspective, how do you translate player interest in climate or environmental themes into concrete in-game experiences without disrupting core gameplay loops?
Hommy Yang: For us, the starting point was always the core experience of Honor of Kings. Players come for competitive gameplay and team coordination, so anything we add has to respect that rhythm. Instead of inserting environmental messaging directly into matches, we designed parallel engagement layers that sit naturally around the gameplay loop.
For example, players could complete daily missions, unlock rare species in a collection book, or participate in mini-games connected to environmental themes. This approach follows one of our key principles: integrate, but not intrude. The environmental narrative becomes part of the broader ecosystem of the game, but it never interrupts the competitive experience players love.
In other words, we translate interest into playable systems, not messages. When players engage through gameplay mechanics, the theme becomes something they experience rather than something we tell them.
When integrating eco-focused content into live service games, what design frameworks or systems help ensure these activations feel authentic rather than purely promotional?
Hommy: For our Green Game Jam participation, we chose the hero Sangqi and the Flourishing Flora skin because the character already represents nature and vitality. That gave us a narrative foundation that players instantly understood.
From there, we worked with three structural pillars:
- Narrative alignment: connecting the game world to real-world ideas. In our case, we framed forests as "Earth's Base," mirroring the Base in the game map.
- Gameplay participation: activities like mini-games or collections that make the theme interactive.
- Real-world impact: ensuring player progress translates into tangible outcomes, such as funding conservation projects.
When those three elements work together, the initiative feels like part of the game's story rather than a marketing campaign.
The Playing for the Planet initiative brings together developers across the industry. From your experience, what are the most effective ways game studios can collaborate on sustainability while still maintaining their unique creative identities?
Lisa: From the Playing for the Planet perspective, the most effective collaboration happens when studios come together around shared goals and learning, but keep the expression of those goals rooted in their own businesses, game worlds, and communities. The Alliance itself is built to enable this: it provides a space where members can meet in person, share challenges, co‑create solutions, and celebrate progress, whether at events like the Green Games Summit or through our regular working groups and All Member calls.
In practice, that means via the Green Game Jam studios might adopt common frameworks, such as integrating environmental themes through live ops events, quests, and narratives, but they tailor those themes to their own tone, mechanics, and audience expectations. Studios contribute in ways that fit their own creative worlds, and this approach turns sustainability into a creative catalyst rather than a constraint.
Because games are fundamentally about story and agency, the emphasis is on weaving climate and nature into the existing fabric of each title so it feels authentic. Knowledge sharing across the Alliance and Green Game Jam participants through best practices, tools, and learnings helps studios to move faster together while still expressing these ideas through their own gameplay, art, and player communities.
Hommy: One of the strengths of Playing for the Planet is that it encourages shared goals but different creative approaches. Every studio has its own genre, audience, and storytelling style. A strategy game, a simulation title, and a MOBA will naturally approach environmental storytelling differently.
The collaboration works best when studios share frameworks and lessons, rather than copying specific mechanics. For example, how to measure impact, how to connect gameplay with real-world outcomes, or how to communicate sustainability authentically.
Within that shared foundation, each game can express the idea through its own universe. For us, it meant integrating environmental storytelling through heroes, social gameplay, and community-driven events in Honor of Kings.
What kinds of player data or community feedback first indicated there was meaningful demand for climate- or nature-focused content inside games?
Hommy: Interestingly, the demand didn’t appear as players asking directly for "environmental events." What we saw instead was a strong response whenever content connected emotionally with the world of the game. Players respond deeply to stories about nature, harmony, or protecting the environment within the game universe.
Once we launched the activation, the response confirmed that instinct. Participation exceeded 90%, and many players returned repeatedly to the mini-game. One player even attempted it more than 500 times in a single day. What that tells us is that players are open to purpose-driven experiences, as long as they are engaging, meaningful, and integrated into the gameplay they already enjoy.
Can you walk through the process of designing and launching an environmentally themed event or activation inside a live game, from concept to implementation?
Hommy: The process usually follows several stages. First, we start with the narrative anchor, a character, story, or theme that naturally fits the game's world. In our case, Sangqi and the Flourishing Flora skin became the core symbol. Second, we build gameplay systems around that narrative. For this activation, which included the rare species collection system and the social mini-game that encouraged teamwork.
Third, we connect gameplay with real-world outcomes, such as funding forest conservation projects when the community reaches a global progress milestone. Finally, because this is a live service game, we closely monitor engagement and player sentiment during the event. That allows us to adjust pacing, difficulty, or rewards in real time. So it's a combination of storytelling, systems design, and live operations working together.
You’ve mentioned measurable impacts like higher engagement, retention, and playtime. What specific metrics do you track to evaluate whether a “design for good” initiative is successful?
Hommy: We usually look at three layers of metrics. First is player engagement, participation rate, repeat play, and social sharing. In this case, over 90% of players joined the event. Second is overall ecosystem health, including playtime and retention. During the campaign, daily playtime increased about 4% year-over-year in Honor of Kings.
Third is real-world impact, which is especially important for initiatives connected to Playing for the Planet. That includes tangible outcomes like retiring 28,000 metric tons of carbon credits, as well as community actions, such as creators organizing offline activities, mangrove restoration efforts in Indonesia, and tree-planting challenges in the Philippines. When engagement, community participation, and real-world impact all move together, we know the initiative is working.
For developers interested in exploring environmentally themed mechanics, are there particular gameplay systems, such as progression, world events, or narrative framing, that lend themselves especially well to these themes?
Hommy: Because Honor of Kings is a MOBA, one of our biggest strengths is its social graph. Players naturally play with friends, invite teammates, and collaborate. So when designing environmentally themed mechanics, we try to capitalize on that social structure and turn individual participation into collective action.
Systems like community progress bars, social mini-games, or invite mechanics work particularly well, because they mirror how environmental action works in real life, which requires teamwork. We also find that collection systems and light narrative framing are effective. They allow players to discover biodiversity or environmental stories in a fun, rewarding way without interrupting the core gameplay experience.
Many studios worry that messaging around sustainability could feel heavy-handed. How do you balance educational or environmental goals with maintaining a fun and engaging player experience?
Hommy: Our philosophy is simple: never start with the message, start with the gameplay. Players should feel curiosity, challenge, or joy first. The meaning comes naturally through the experience. For example, instead of explaining environmental protection directly, we designed gameplay that required persistence and teamwork.
Players felt those challenges themselves. When the experience is enjoyable and authentic, players don't feel like they are being taught a lesson. They feel like they are participating in something meaningful.
Looking ahead, how do you see "game design for good" evolving over the next five years, and what role might player communities play in shaping those initiatives?
Lisa: Over the next five years, "game design for good" will become less a niche experiment and more a mainstream design consideration, both in terms of content and production. On screen, that looks like games where the "good" (environmental impact, for example) is woven directly into gameplay, narrative, and worldbuilding, creating emotional connections through agency, collaboration, and resilience, but without lecturing players or undermining fun and adventure.
Behind the scenes, it also means focusing on energy‑efficient code, optimised assets, and development processes that consciously reduce a game's environmental footprint while still aiming for large‑scale audiences and top high-quality user experiences. Player communities are positioned as a decisive force in how this evolves. Our research shows that players want environmentally related content, and the message to the "average consumer" is that games are part of the system shaping how the environmental crisis will unfold.
Every choice, from hardware purchasing and upgrade cycles to whether players notice and support green events in their favourite titles, sends a signal. When millions of players reward studios that respect the planet, it becomes much easier for developers and publishers to make sustainability a core feature rather than a side quest.
Hommy: First, purpose-driven design will move earlier in development, rather than being added as seasonal events. Environmental storytelling, social impact systems, and real-world connections could become part of the core design of games. Second, player communities will play a much larger role. Games connect hundreds of millions of people, and when communities rally around a shared cause, the impact can scale dramatically.
What we saw with Honor of Kings is that players don't just want entertainment, they also want meaning. When we allow them to act together, they are incredibly powerful. That's why we believe the future is not only play for fun, but increasingly play for the planet.
