Greenwash: The Dubious Environmentalism of PlanetPlay

Note: I'll keep repeating this throughout the article, but to be clear, I am not accusing any party mentioned in this blog of legal misconduct.

During the Summer Game Fest this year, there was one livestream I sat all the way through, but couldn't turn into a blog. It was a show that caught my attention not for its content, but for the rabbit hole it dragged me down. That stream was the Green Games Showcase, whose bill was jam-packed with titles and events bearing an environmentalist theme. Spokesgamers for the programme claimed that you could save the planet just by spending on its products. Paradoxically, the presentation was also speckled with generative AI and exuberance over brand "activations", and for some reason, it ended in an interview with Eidos co-founder Ian Livingstone. The Showcase raised a number of questions. Who thinks that you can cater to people who cherish the environment using power-guzzling neural nets? How can buying a video game save the planet? And why was Agent 47's Dad here?

Before we can answer these questions, we need some background. The consumer demand for planetary conservation is ostensibly forcing polluters to clean up their act and clean up our Earth. Marketing materials tell us that the old enemies of life are removing non-biodegradables from the supply chain and ditching fossil fuels for renewable power. However, there are few incentives for these miserly companies to undergo costly reconstruction or put life before profit, and more financial reasons for them to merely market themselves as champions of sustainability.

We live in a pantomime reality where energy companies announce that they're transitioning away from fossil fuels even while keeping the large majority of their capital in oil, gas, and coal. Tech firms brag about their environmentalist bonafides while drinking down a small sun's worth of power. This is the age of greenwashing: the use of environmentalism as a brand with which to launder corporate reputations even as those corporations salt our Earth and choke our skies.

On an unrelated note, the Green Games Showcase is an advertising vehicle for the digital video game store PlanetPlay. PlanetPlay says it donates 100% of proceeds from its sales to "certified green projects". By its count, it has supported schemes that collectively saved around 97,000 trees, removing 19,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere.^[1] However, anyone who's tried to confirm the figures touted by CO2 offsetters knows their claims can be unreliable. I've talked in more detail about dodgy offsetting metrics in my Horizon: Zero Dawn and Civilization: Gathering Storm blogs, but the bottom line is that there are standard industry cheat codes for exaggerating greenhouse offsets: using software that calculates savings inaccurately, cherrypicking data, claiming to protect land that was already protected, etc.^[2][3][4] Climate experts also harbour concerns about the threats carbon-sequestering forests can pose to local biodiversity.

Much of the time, the issue isn't that we can point to a single ton of carbon that's supposedly been counteracted and show that counteraction was falsified. Nor is it that we can demonstrate that particular ton was reabsorbed with techniques that have ruinous ecological side effects. The issue is that with deleterious practices being so prevalent and without independent eyes checking in on every forest, there's always the chance a carbon creditor is playing fast and loose with the truth. Given their history, organisations claiming to offset CO2 emissions deserve acute scrutiny. When a company like PlanetPlay tells me that they're raising money to save trees, I have to ask for robust evidence, and in the absence of that evidence, I can't know that they're reducing emissions, and neither can you.

On its website, PlanetPlay is very cagey about how it ensures it is positively contributing to the environment, and that's a red flag. Reading through the NGO's site, I found a lot of allusions to verified calculations and transparent conduct. So, I kept clicking links and turning pages, always expecting to find out exactly what their methodologies were around the next corner. I only ever found more statements about how they have methodologies for communication and verification. For example, PlanetPlay's "How It Works" page says that its figure of 19,000 tons offset is calculated "scientifically" but doesn't mention what the science is.^[1]

Most of the public-facing information on the company comes by way of its 2024 Green Credentials Report, which contains lines like:

"By leveraging proven tools, data, and best practices, we not only raise awareness but also inspire meaningful action towards a sustainable future".

A sentence like this does nothing for us when the report doesn't continue on to mention what those tools, datasets, or practices are. Bizarrely, most of the paper is a Q&A with PlanetPlay chair Rhea Loucas, who gasses up a previously unintroduced company called Sphaira Innovation.^[5] Sphaira is the parent company of PlanetPlay, but the document doesn't consider it important to mention that, and the whole interview is full of this kind of vaguery:^[5][6]

"Q: What specific criteria does Sphaira Innovation use to identify climate action projects worth supporting? ^[...]

A: We support projects that generate multiple SDG impacts, with climate as a focus, but tap into other criteria as well. Five or more SDG goals are preferred."^[5]

For reference, SDG is a set of climate goals that were adopted by the UN in 2015. It's nice that Loucas wants to support those goals, but she doesn't answer how she knows the projects she funds are reaching those targets and invokes a set of other climate criteria with no mention of what those criteria are. Then there's this very foggy call and response:

"Q: How do you collaborate with other organisations, governments, or investors to co-fund or support larger climate projects? How do you ensure alignment between Sphaira Innovation's goals and those of your partners?

A: We are open to all kinds of collaborations, all of which will again be subject to due diligence and assessed by the three layers of our compliance structure. Potential partners will also need to contribute resources to the project."^[5]

So there's some kind of assessment within some sort of multi-layer structure, and allies that undergo that assessment need to contribute something. It's impressive to be able to craft sentences that contain this little information. It's as if Loucas woke up that morning to find she was chair of PlanetPlay and was just having to wing it. If you think I'm omitting key details or only representing the worst answers from the report, please scroll down to the notes section of this article and check out source 5 for yourself. I could have picked any question and response from the paper; they're all like this.

Another question arises, one not asked by Loucas's interviewer: If you can prove that you have counterbalanced 19,000 tons of carbon, why write all this waffle instead of just showing us the evidence? Above their "19,000 tons" figure, PlanetPlay says we can put our faith in their stats because they're audited by "EY".^[1] If you know anything about accounting, this is very funny. EY (formerly Ernst & Young) is one of the "big four" global accounting firms and, like the other three, has apparently been cursed by a witch to infinitely generate scandals. Some might say that fraud is built into the top accounting firms' business models. I, however, do not like getting sued and am not saying that. What I can tell you is that EY's rap sheet includes:

1. Being fined almost £5 million this year for (allegedly) failing to properly audit holiday company Thomas Cook. Thomas Cook collapsed in 2019, leaving behind £1.6 billion in debt.^[7][8]
2. Getting fined $100 million by the SEC because of all the EY employees (allegedly) cheating on accountancy ethics exams and due to its (alleged) obstruction of the investigation of that cheating.
3. (Allegedly) letting (an alleged) $2.1 billion disappear off of financial tech firm Wirecard's (alleged) books when they were meant to be auditing their (alleged) accounts. Oh no!

Their Mona Lisa, however, was auditing Lehman Brothers at the moment it hit the iceberg. For those too young to remember, the 2008 recession was set off by a bevvy of companies and securities being horridly overvalued.^[9][10] One of the nudest emperors was Lehman Brothers, then the fourth-largest investment bank in the world and, therefore, a vital pillar of the global economy.^[11] Lehman Bros. had staked a small fortune on a class of commodities that turned out to be about as valuable as a lump of wood.^[9][10] It made matters worse by illegally hiding $50 billion in capital.^[11] The cost to pay for all this was complete bankruptcy, and the people who were meant to be verifying Lehman's accounts? Ernst & Young. The court in charge of investigating Lehman Bros. found that EY knew all about their book-cooking but averted their eyes.^[11][12] The collapse was the largest bankruptcy in US history. It made Enron look like a mom-and-pop store closing.

These are not a few isolated incidents. EY allegedly breaks financial law about as often as you'd get a new pair of shoes, and I am not accusing PlanetPlay or its partners of financial fraud, but why would PlanetPlay try to legitimise itself by mentioning EY? Most customers won't know who EY is, and the ones that do are going to be hearing alarm bells as soon as they read the name. I wasn't even thinking that there might be monetary malfeasance happening on the Planet of Play; they've just needlessly opened up a whole new dimension of worry for me. Fortunately, next to EY's name, it says "We are transparent about our operation". Phew!

But let's try to get back on track: Mentioning your financial auditors above your claims of carbon offsets is weird because you're making an ecological claim but trying to back it up with economic evidence. What I want to know, besides whether your accounting is on the level, is whether your figures for carbon sequestration are accurate. Now, PlanetPlay says that their carbon capture is given a tick by GoldStandard and Verra.^[1] These are two carbon credit accreditors, but the incentives to improperly substantiate carbon offsets has made these verification services hard to trust, and Verra is exactly the kind of firm that gave carbon credits a bad name.

Verra is the world's most-employed carbon credit certifier, but in 2023, journalists from The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial cast doubt on those certifications. They extrapolated data from studies on Verra by both international scientists and those at the University of Cambridge. The journalists claim that the data shows 94% of carbon credits approved by Verra didn't correspond to any carbon offsetting. In other words, only 6% of the carbon offsets they approved were real, and everything else was (alleged) fraud.^[13] Verra disputes this claim, of course, but implicitly admitted their system was flawed by saying that they needed and would implement a new methodology. That system is meant to go live this year. Yet, PlanetPlay has been happy to use Verra's services before that migration, I see no reason to trust Verra now, and the new system still relies on this questionable carbon offset practice of predicting the future.^[14] The switchover hasn't been going great either.

See, after drawing up the new parameters by which they'll calculate carbon credits, Verra enlisted the help of another carbon credit auditor: Aster Global Environmental Solutions. Aster was there to confirm that Verra's incoming rules were, at last, going to sort the true credits from the fakes.^[14] However, a 2023 report from climate activist group Survival International says that Aster previously conspired with Verra to generate false carbon credits and damage the livelihood of indigenous Kenyans. In Survival's report, we see two authenticators putting the farming culture and food security of Kenyans at risk, while exaggerating CO2 offsets.^[14][15] You've got other experts saying that Aster inflated claims about forest protection in the Andes, and Bloomberg and separate firms saying they did the same in Zimbabwe.^[14][16] If these muck-rakers are right, Aster partnering with Verra might not be independent auditing, but one hand washing the other.

Turning carbon credits into a commodity motivates both investigators and the investigated to pretend that offsetting is occurring, even when it's not, because that's what keeps the money flowing. There's every incentive to fudge the numbers and no one to audit the auditors. As the Associated Press writes, "the market is largely self-regulated".^[16] There are parallels to the overvaluation of subprime mortgages in the headwinds of the 2008 recession, and we already covered how that went. In short, I generally don't trust green accreditation firms, but if I had to place my belief in one, it wouldn't be Verra, and it's Verra meant to be keeping an eye on PlanetPlay.

For more foxes guarding the henhouse, check out the board of Sphaira, PlanetPlay's parent company.^[6] As far as I can tell, there's no dirt on CEO and founder Rhea Loucas, but the rest of the list is quite the ID parade. Sphaira vice chair, Dirk van Daele, is a board member of SquaredFinancial, a speculative asset manager that profits from Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash.^[6][17] BitCoin Cash is a fork of BitCoin. Earth, Dirk and his crypto are here to save you. The only catch is that the UN estimates that between January 2020 and December 2021 alone, Bitcoin mining produced over 85 metric tons of CO2, "equivalent to the emission caused by burning 84 billion pounds of coal or running 190 natural gas-fired power plants". Litecoin uses the same power-intensive "proof of work" system that Bitcoin does.^[18][19]

Board member Pierre Mallevays is the co-head of the merchant banking team for Stanhope Capital, a wealth management firm that oversees more than $41 billion.^[6][20] Stanhope Capital was partially funded by crypto trading platform gate.io to the tune of $10m.^[21] Stanhope now plans to expand into Saudi Arabia, where finance is closely entangled with the oil industry.^[22][23] The state-owned oil and gas firm, Saudi Aramco, is the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter. This expansion is taking place through a partnership with Gulf International Bank, which lends financing and advisory services to oil, gas, and petrochemical companies, with the majority stake in GIB being held by the Saudi government.^[22][24][25]

Okay, let's see if we can do any better with Sphaira board member Gabriela Maria Player. Ah, no, she is vice-chairwoman of Sygnum Bank, a crypto asset management company, and you better believe that crypto includes Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin.^[6][26]

Lastly, Sphaira board member Thomas Werlen is a managing partner of the legal firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.^[6] Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan's list of clients is crawling with fossil fuel suppliers. In its own words, it "regularly" defends energy "industry giants" like Entergy, Exxon, Total, Shell, CNOOC, Occidental Petroleum, Petronas, Sonatrach, and Repsol. Forgive me if I think that the board of PlanetPlay might be more interested in generating profit than protecting the climate. I swear, half the time I look up the people from these "green innovation" firms, they turn out to be the CEO of, like, Viscera LLC, a company that specialises in killing baby elephants.

Once you understand the connection of PlanetPlay to private capital, it's no mystery how Ian Livingstone found himself on the tailfin of the Green Games Showcase. Nothing can diminish Livingstone's contributions to games; he played a pivotal role in the founding of Games Workshop and Eidos, just for starters, but it is also true that Livingstone's trying to grow the industry through the watering can of venture capital.^[27] His venture capital company is gushing money into AI and the metaverse.^[27][28]

Scientists estimate that between the end of 2022 and the end of 2023, data centres in North America roughly doubled their power consumption, partly due to AI. According to researchers from the Universities of California and Texas, AI will consume a minimum 4.2 billion cubic meters of water in 2027.^[29] As for the metaverse, it's used the same technology that's driven BitCoin.^[30] That interest in capital injection and support for blockchain tech, Livingstone shares with some of Sphaira's board members, so it's natural that he became an ambassador for the company. As he's an ambassador, why wouldn't PlanetPlay use him to drum up attention for what is essentially their E3 keynote?

This whole blog might sound rather cynical, but I'm not here because I don't think climate initiatives can get results, and I want to like the projects that PlanetPlay backs. The idea of playing games, supporting indigenous people, and reducing net CO2 could make this store a triple threat. However, green consumerism has been such a hotbed of lies and regression that anyone in this field has a high burden of proof if they want to claim they're not embroiled in the same subterfuge. That is not a burden that PlanetPlay attempts to shoulder. I am also uninterested in absolving the sins of a bunch of crypto bankers and fossil fuel lawyers. If you're looking for a climate charity that'll put your money to good use and support folk in the global south, I'd steer you towards 350.org. 350 is bringing renewable power to Africa and campaigning to raise taxes on billionaires.

As for PlanetPlay, the good news is that their target market got one whiff of their corporate allegiances and ran for the hills. The company's figure of ~97,000 trees protected makes it sound as though it has impassioned grassroots support, but their shop window tells a different story. See, when you browse PlanetPlay's store, they tell you how many trees were supposedly saved via the sales of each product. At the time of writing, the most popular item listed in the shop is the SCUM Complete Bundle with 12.1 trees saved. There was something called the "Ultimate Gold Pack" for Nitro Nation listed last month, and apparently, 35.9 trees owed their lives to it. That entry has mysteriously disappeared and couldn't be saved by the Wayback Machine, so if you feel you can, take me at my word. Still, whichever of these figures you go with, these are molecularly small carbon offsets, and the vast majority of items in the shop claim to have rescued fewer than ten trees. So, how do we get from those single-digit payoffs to the claim of almost 100,000 trees safeguarded? At least one of the three following statements must be true:

1. PlanetPlay's "How It Works" page is misreporting the total number of trees saved.
2. PlanetPlay's store is misreporting the number of trees saved per product.
3. Almost none of PlanetPlay's money comes from sales, and almost all of it arrives from private donors.

I don't think these anomalous figures are an innocent glitch. To the eye, PlanetPlay's site is professionally coded. Let's be generous and say that option three is the correct one. This is probably the case of some investors wanting to shower in the green rain of a climate charity, but while contributors' wallets bleed into the PlanetPlay fund, commenters are warding off anyone who isn't an investor. Posts under the Green Games Showcase are about as damning as the stats on PlanetPlay's store. For viewers, the word of the day was "greenwashing", and they saved their most scathing ire for the AI slop. Exhibitor EarthWISE proudly used generative models for its trailer and in-game assets, and the results speak for themselves. I also have my suspicions about TinyBytes, and I'm quite sure that a number of the images on the PlanetPlay site were not made by a person.

It's hard to imagine how anyone at the company thought this would go over well. PlanetPlay isn't like another video game mart that can entice buyers with exclusive products or uniquely low prices and then hope that no one looks into their ethical conduct. The seller is wholly dependent on customers flocking to it because they perceive it as ecologically benevolent. Having failed at convincing patrons of that altruism, the service is doomed to extinction. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. How PlanetPlay Works by PlanetPlay Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed August 3, 2025), PlanetPlay.
2. Carbon offsets used by major airlines based on flawed system, warn experts by Patrick Greenfield (May 4, 2021), The Guardian.
3. These Trees Are Not What They Seem by Ben Elgin (December 9, 2020), Bloomberg.
4. The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere by Lisa Song, et al. (April 29, 2021), ProPublica.
5. PlanetPlay Green Credential Report 2024 by PlanetPlay Staff (2024), PlanetPlay.
6. Sphaira Innovation Homepage by Sphaira Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed August 3, 2025), Sphaira Innovation.
7. EY fined almost £5m for breaching standards in Thomas Cook audit by Kalyeena Makortoff (April 10, 2025), The Guardian.
8. Perfect storm of change, debt and Brexit sank Thomas Cook by David McHugh (September 24, 2019), The Seattle Times.
9. Lehman Brothers: 1850 - 2008 Exhibition: Bankruptcy by Laura Linard et al. (Date Unknown, Accessed August 3, 2025), Harvard Business School.
10. Lehman Brothers: 1850 - 2008 Exhibition: Global Impact of the Collapse by Laura Linard et al. (Date Unknown, Accessed August 3, 2025), Harvard Business School.
11. The case against Lehman Brothers by CBS Staff (April 23, 2012), CBS News.
12. Wiggins, R.Z. et al. (2019). The Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy D: The Role of Ernst & Young. Journal of Financial Crises vol. 1, no. 1 (p. 100-123).
13. Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows by Patrick Greenfield (January 18, 2023), The Guardian.
14. Verra’s revamped forest offset programme comes under fire by Matteo Civillini (May 4, 2023), Climate Home News.
15. Counsell, S. (2023). Blood Carbon: how a carbon offset scheme makes millions from Indigenous land in Northern Kenya. Survival International.
16. ‘Gone wrong’: Doubts on carbon-credit program in Peru forest by Ed Davey (March 30, 2023), Associated Press.
17. Crypto CFDs by SquaredFinancial (Date Unknown, Accessed August 3, 2025), SquaredFinancial.
18. Tayebi, S., Amini, H. (2024). The flip side of the coin: Exploring the environmental and health impacts of proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining. Environmental Research vol. 252, no. 1.
19. What is Proof-Of-Work? by LTC Foundation Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed August 3, 2025), Litecoin.
20. About by Stanhope Capital Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed August 3, 2025), Stanhope Capital Group.
21. Stanhope Financial Group Secures $10 Million Funding from Gate.io by Felipe Erazo (May 13, 2022), Finance Magnates.
22. Stanhope Capital partners with PIF’s GIB for Saudi expansion. PLUS: I-Squared plans to open a Saudi office this year by Enterprise Staff (April 30, 2025), Enterprise.
23. Abdou, H.A., Elamer, A.A, et al. (2024). The impact of oil and global markets on Saudi stock market predictability: A machine learning approach. Energy Economics vol. 132.
24. G.I.B. Staff (2024). Investor Presentation. Gulf International Bank B.S.C.
25. Company Insights: Gulf International Bank by AGBI Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed August 3, 2025), Arabian Gulf Business Insight.
26. Litecoin by Sygnum Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed August 3, 2025), Sygnum Bank.
27. Hiro Capital Celebrates Award of Knighthood to Co-Founding Partner, Sir Ian Livingstone, in Recognition of His Service to Video Games by Business Wire Staff (January 3, 2022), Business Wire.
28. Hiro Capital Homepage by Hiro Capital Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed August 3, 2025), Hiro Capital.
29. Li, P., Yang, J., et al. (2025). Making AI Less 'Thirsty': Uncovering and addressing the secret water footprint of AI models. Communications of the ACM vol. 68, no. 7 (p. 54-61).
30. The Metaverse Requires a Whole New Vocabulary to Navigate Web3 by Claire Ballentine and Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou (April 8, 2022), Bloomberg.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.