PlanetPlay’s thoughts from NYC Climate Summit & Playcon Malta

The past few weeks have been a busy time on the road for the PlanetPlay team, connecting in person with both the green community and the games industry during a series of important – and very different – events, united by a singular goal: protecting our environment.

Firstly, Climate Week NYC (September 21-28): A now well-established annual event that brings together a mix of leaders from the world of business, tech, politics, academia, and civil society that have the means, the scale and the ideas to take bold action.

The week kicked off with the star studded NAT Gala, run by the unstoppable force of Gail Gallie (also a PlanetPlay advisor!) and Jay Lipman, Co-Founder of Ethic. The Gala is a truly broad cultural gathering, uniting leaders from business, philanthropy, conservation, and the arts with a singular goal: closing the $711 billion global nature finance gap.

Climate Week NYC week runs alongside the UN General Assembly, which meant the Big Apple was the perfect platform from which to spread our Make Green Moves message.

PlanetPlay’s Chief Strategy Officer Jude Ower had the honour of being invited to a dinner hosted by our friends at SYBO and the Danish Embassy, at the Danish Ambassador’s residence. It was a fantastic gathering of games industry leaders and policy makers, all discussing the power of our industry to halt the climate crisis.

In addition, SYBO, the Danish Embassy and PlanetPlay hosted a roundtable – ‘Gaming For Good: How Do We Maximize the Real-World Impact of the Games Industry’ – to bring in more voices on the topic.

We discussed: in-game activations, gaming and policy making and reducing the carbon footprint of the industry. There were many ideas for action, which are being written up as a policy paper by the University of Greater Manchester as part of the EU & UKRI funded GREAT Project – this will be released shortly, alongside with a number of useful resources.

In the meantime, the newly-released GREAT Toolkit is available. The Toolkit can be used by a range of stakeholders for leveraging games technology to engage peers and the wider public on climate policy. From small-scale facilitated gameplay to large-scale mass rollouts, the GREAT Project has created the next-level thinking, processes and tools to help game makers tackle societal issues.

From New York we moved to Playcon (October 9-12) in Malta, traditionally home of many iGaming companies and now increasingly a home for more video games studios and service companies. Again, our CSO Jude Ower took to the stage in a fireside chat, to talk about Gaming for Good (you can check out the book here) and how games can be an incredible platform for climate action.

Playcon is also focused on gamers, with what can be described as a mini Gamescom for kids: the consumer area attracted school children from across the island in their thousands! They played games, competed in esports and created content, as exhibitors showed them the breadth of what the industry has to offer. The atmosphere was electric!

It also gave much food for thought for Playcon 2026, and how we can educate the next generation on how they can play and save the planet… watch this space!

To learn more about PlanetPlay and to get your games listed on our marketplace, visit https://partners.planetplay.com.

See how PlanetPlay works: https://youtu.be/0v_O0Ji4PpE