Here is Quibans 2:
This news story from the Daily Telegraph contains some figures that at the least require some interpretation and might actually be contradictory.
How much does your gaming habit add to your energy bill?
Britain's love of gaming is costing us dearly, after the cost of energy required to power our favourite consoles has rocketed in the past 30 years.
Today's hi-tech machines cost around four times as much money to run as the humble platforms of yesteryear, including the Sega Mega Drive, Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64, according to research from British Gas.
Today, one pound's worth of electricity will power your Xbox One for around 22 hours, at an average cost of £43 a year, while Sony's PlayStation 4 is considerably cheaper at £35 per annum at 25 hours of play.
At the opposite end of the scale, £1 would have generated 49 hours of Sega Mega Drive game play, at an annual cost of £11. The Nintendo 64 matched the yearly price with 48 hours of play, while the Super Nintendo eked out 48 hours of play per pound, at an annual cost of £12.
It takes around 47 hours of gameplay to complete Fallout 4 on Xbox One, at a cost of around £1.69, whereas 97.5 hours of playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on PlayStation 4 will cost you £3.86, the data found.
World of Warcraft is better value, costing £31.66 for 1180 hours of play on your desktop PC.The first thing that springs to mind here is to wonder:
- Do people play for longer nowadays than they used to on older machines?
Let's use the numbers.
Number of hours
per £1
|
Annual cost
|
Number of hours
per year
|
|
Xbox One
|
22
|
£43
|
946
|
PlayStation 4
|
25
|
£35
|
875
|
Sega Mega Drive
|
49
|
£11
|
539
|
Super Nintendo
|
48
|
£12
|
576
|
So this appears to be telling us that users of an Xbox One will play for longer (on average) than owners of a PlayStation 4, and that they both play considerably longer than people used to on the older consoles.
On average that is over 2 and a half hours per day.
The penultimate paragraph I quoted above doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the information.
If the Xbox One lasts for 22 hours for each £1 of electricity then 47 hours of gameplay should cost about 47/22 = 2.1, which is about £2.10, not the £1.69 in the article. Does this mean they messed up the figures? Or that some games require more energy than others? Or something else? [37 hours (rather than 47 hours) does fit - perhaps it was a typo?]
The PlayStation 4 figures give us 97.5/25 = 3.9, which is £3.90 and this does fits with the £3.86 in the article (allowing for rounding errors).
The final sentence leads to another question:
The final sentence leads to another question:
- What is the energy-efficiency of a PC?
1180/31.66 = 37, so you get 37 hours per £1 on a PC (playing World of Warcraft).
Link to the article:
