My kids ask me all kinds of bizarre questions.
As I was doing research for a presentation I gave at the Login conference earlier this year, I discovered a bit of information that even put a quizzical look on my children’s faces.
how many cows go into the running of an MMO?
It sounds bizarre, but this is what I found out. In 2007, the top 60 MMOs had about 27 million players(globally). And using information I can’t share I came up with a, reasonably good, estimate that it took just over 100,000 servers to support those people. (by the way, that number has shot up about 10x between 2007 and 2009).
Using an industry average power consumption per server, on the average pizzabox server, I calculated those servers consumed about 75,000 kilowatts per hour. Using the metric that coal creates 2460 KW hours per ton gave me an estimate that the top 60 MMOs produced about 103 tons of equivalent CO2 emissions in 2007.
It turns out that a US Dairy farmer can claim that a lactating cow produces 5 tons of CO2 equivalent per year. The simple math shows that amount is produced by just over 20 mil cows.
About 1/3
Meaning, that in 2007 at least, each MMO produced about the same amount of pollution as a Tillamook Holstein produces in 4 months.
