A report by the French company Greenly, titled "The Carbon Footprint of Gaming," shows that the production and delivery of physical copies are 100 times more harmful to the environment. Manufacturing and packaging a million discs create about 312 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, while downloading the same number of digital copies of a 70 GB game produces only 3 tons.
The head of the study noted in an interview that cloud gaming is also not harmless: servers require constant operation and huge energy costs. However, the damage from the production and packaging of physical media is still significantly higher.
Digital downloading is only associated with electricity consumption in the player's home, but does not create the industrial emissions that accompany the production of discs and consoles — processes that have one of the strongest impacts on the climate.