Ben Abraham

@afterclimate

I research games + sustainability, currently working for the Sustainable Games Alliance to produce a methodological standard for measuring games emissions. Was @afterclimate on Twitter

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Ben Abraham@afterclimate· 5d

This is a really good piece, and the way of describing the production consequences of decisions in gamedev is great, but also worth noting that it is *obviously* an AI written text. That in itself is not an argument against its validity or content, but it is funny, and notable.

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· 8d

A China Apology Form made out to Xi Jinping with various funny listed reasons for behaviour

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· 21d

Air conditioning rates around the world, per the IEA.

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· 26d

What

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· 27d

Lately I keep finding myself returning to this sentiment from an old Alexander Cockburn piece... and finding it still resonates all these years later. "Alex, is your hate pure?" "Yes, Jim, my hate is pure."

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· 29d

You must imagine us fools

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Jul 3

Everyone should watch Bunny it’s one of the best, most bizarrely uplifting films I’ve seen in ages.

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Jul 1

The plastic burden *is real* though - from 2000-2018 the number of game console discs sold produced a stack of plastic discs 9km tall. That doesn’t make Sony’s choice “good” but it does highlight the tradeoffs.

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Jun 24

Advocate for whatever you want but heat is killing vulnerable Europeans *right now* and poo-pooing the idea of private AC is literally insane.

A chart titled "Heat versus gun deaths in Europe and the United States" – including gun homicides and suicides, Europe has almost as many excess heat deaths.

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· May 11

Is this...good? via @ketanjoshi.co

A chart titled "2004-2026 World Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change or Global Warming" shows a decline since peaks in 2022/3

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· May 5

Ahhh it seems like it’s all just steam price manipulation via discounts and bundles - maybe less money laundering than I thought.

A r/Steam thread where users describe highly inflated prices of Steam games as exisiting to “inflate the value of random steam key bundles you can buy”.

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Apr 29

Advertise your account with a Simpsons image

Bart Simpson says "This is the hottest summer of my life"
Homer kneels down patronisingly with a hand on Barts shoulder and says "This is the coldest summer of the rest of your life"

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Apr 23

Just need to subsidise demand some more...

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Apr 20

Great...

Cloudflare System Status
Issues solving Challenges
Investigating - Cloudflare is aware that some visitors are currently unable to pass challenges. We are investigating the issue.
Apr 20, 2026 - 05:01 UTC

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Apr 10

The slightly simpler alternative is that it's just pure achievement hunter spam garbage – one reviewer describes one of the games like this: "as a curiosity or for a quick dose of achievements, it's adequate."

This game drops you in a cursed desert where soccer seems to be the only law. The Old West aesthetic, mixed with a supernatural touch, creates a curious atmosphere that, while simple, is striking and even funny.

But the real "curse" came right from the start:
I opened the game and all six achievements popped up one after another, as if the ghostly sheriff himself were rushing me out of there. I hadn't even touched the ball and it was already "completed." A comical detail, but one that makes it clear the experience is geared more towards quick achievements than a real challenge.

The gameplay is minimal, the minutes of content fly by, and the match ends before you can even settle into your chair. That said, as a curiosity or for a quick dose of achievements, it's adequate.

In short: a brief stroll through a haunted West where the rewards come on their own. Fun for a few moments, but too fleeting to recommend beyond the achievement collection.

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Apr 10

Just some very normal Steam pricing right here. The games are also barely even finished. Trailers that are 14 seconds long. Asset store assets. Bunch of default project looking graphics... the only thing I think might explain it is........ money laundering?

A series of extremely expensive Steam bundles priced at $1261, $1565 and $2044 each.

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Mar 29

Too many terrifying indicators in this piece on the AI bubble - but the collapsing price of *rented* compute on current gen flagship AI chips is… errr… yet another worrying indicator open.substack.com/pub/no01/p/t...

Meanwhile, the thing these data centres actually run on - GPUs - is collapsing in price. And not gently.
In December I mentioned GPU rental prices had dropped 23%. That was quaint. H100 cloud pricing has now fallen 64-75% from late 2024 levels. From $8-10 per hour to $2.99. On marketplace providers like Vast.ai you can rent an H100 for $1.49 an hour. The chip that was supposed to underpin the AI revolution is now cheaper per hour than a cup of coffee in most Starbucks.
A100s? $0.75 an hour on some platforms.
And it’s about to get worse. Blackwell B200 GPUs are shipping now, which means the entire H-series is sliding toward commodity pricing. Previous-gen flagships typically see about 15% list-price cuts within six months of a new generation launch. The H100 hasn't looked down yet.
Remember that I mentioned that below $1.65/h the rental economics stopped working? Well, we’re way below that on the cheaper providers. The very infrastructure these companies are committing trillions to build is becoming uneconomical whilst they’re still building it.
It’s like when hotel rates are cratering and somehow you decide the solution is to build more hotels.

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Mar 22

There really is a certain clarity in humour!!! Very funny stuff if you can stomach it.

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Mar 18

Still, they can't avoid the rev share question, though they leave it to the end, and note that "more and more games from developers big and small have reached [the] new higher revenue share". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Text reads: The work we shipped in 2025 continues a long trend of iterating on existing systems and introducing new ones to make Steam better. Ideas like the Discovery Queue, Developer homepages, or Steam Playtest start as small beta features and continue to improve years later based on customer use cases and developer requests. That iterative approach focused on meeting the needs of developers and players has led to consistent long term growth, and the opportunity on Steam is bigger than ever.

Five years ago, Steam was growing steadily and crossed the 25 million concurrent user mark for the first time. In the years since, we’ve grown at a pace of around 3.4 million additional concurrent users per year, reaching 42 million peak concurrent users.

All those users are downloading a lot of content. In 2024 we delivered about 80 exabytes to customers, and in 2025 that grew to 100 exabytes. It's hard to make sense of such a huge number, but just for fun: Steam users are averaging 274 petabytes of installs and updates per day- that's 11.42 petabytes per hour, which is about 190,000 GB of data per minute.

That user growth translates to more revenue for game developers. Since the 2018 announcement of the 75% and 80% revenue share tiers, more and more games from developers big and small have reached new higher revenue share. The revenue share paid out across all non-Valve games on Steam in 2025 was 76%, and that does not include any revenue developers may earn selling free Steam keys outside of Steam. Back in 2024, we shipped a new notification feature for developers to make it more clear when their game has crossed a new revenue share tier, and developers can see a game’s progress towards those higher tiers in their sales reporting.

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Mar 18

This year, it's hardware & improvements to the platform through better "Shopping and Discoverability", plus better "tools" to understand users and market data.

Highlighted text from Steam year in review for 2025 that reads: "Our goal is that small improvements like this will build trust with customers and provide a better shopping experience, which in turn helps developers find their audience on Steam and ultimately sell more copies of their games."

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Mar 18

My best pull so far

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Mar 16

Single–origin copper, coming soon to a smelter near you. Ea-nāṣir is rubbing his hands together in glee.

Ben Abraham@afterclimate· Mar 9

Pretty unimpressed by German urban air quality tbh. Don’t see this talked about much, but so much for the fabled European emissions standards. P much every time I’ve opened the weather app in Berlin or Frankfurt it’s been this sea of red