ZAH: With the three main products now sold on the market, the Wii from Nintendo does stand out. Of course, from an application point of view, there’s a huge difference between the Wii and the PlayStation. We’re fully aware of that. But even on idle mode, which is basically just switching on the console, the difference is huge – it’s 15 watts for the Wii, while it’s 128 watts for the PlayStation 3. That’s almost 1000% more. It’s scary to see those differences.

And yes, when you have millions of units of these products being sold globally, you’re contributing to climate change, and environmental problems, and there’s a need to act. For us, we see the problems that exist in that, but if Nintendo can manage to cut down the idle mode energy usage to 15 watts, why can’t Sony and Microsoft?

GS: That was one of the things I wanted to ask – why that difference does exist. Are there things Nintendo is doing with the Wii that seems focused on energy consumption, even in some small form?

ZAH: Well, that’s the dilemma that we’re having with Nintendo now. We’re not getting any reply from them whatsoever, since we started trying to communicate with them, and that was before we launched the game console website. It’s interesting for us in this campaign as Greenpeace, because we’ve been in touch with all of these companies, and we have constant communication via face to face meetings, conference calls, email exchange – they’ve all been aware of our campaign, our demands.

We discussed the challenges with them, and why certain companies are not acting on that. Nintendo stand out as the only company who has refused to communicate back, so far.

GS: Speaking as someone who writes about games for a living, not getting a response from Nintendo is actually nothing new. [Laughs] They’re not the most communicative of companies. It’s not just you.

ZAH: Oh, really? Well, we don’t even know how they manage to cut down their energy consumption to that level. We’ve tested those three devices in our lab and we have seen them, worked with them – we played them, to understand. [Laughs] We’re not big gamers here, but we tried to understand why people would pay to have them in their homes.

The Wii stands out in terms of size, and if I compare them visually, the Wii uses more standardised material – it’s all done using the same material which makes it easier to recycle.

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