@tekknik Of course, because it hides half of the supply chain waste through energy production and the secondary industries involved in the hardware production, not just of that datacenter but all datacenters and network infrastructure, involved in its delivery, including at the telephone pole and consumer hardware level. Additionally it doesn't factor in the purchase of local storage, also manufactured, which would have been unnecessary with individual game purchases, or rather, the waste of both converge. It also doesn't factor into alternative industrial/economic activity that would be created in the absence of the manufacture supply jobs for the cartridges, unless the goal is to simply purge the excess humans, which honestly, is a pretty green idea. This never gets factored in to such studies, rather than factoring direct waste from direct manufacture. It's less direct to track all the involved elements so you get an incomplete picture of what's really involved compared to a fairly easy to itemize traditional manufacture process. Such studies are too narrow in scope, they focus on the immediate and direct impact and not the broad, large scale impact that gets affected several layers away from the direct output.

But regardless of that, it's still what has become the corporate rage these days. Sell the self-serving, thieving, one-way mechanisms of fleecing consumers and using the modern internet landscape to control how people even use the products they sell, then blanket it in some show of how "green" it is, so people like yourself support and endorse it. They are not making these changes to be "green", to "save the Earth", to make you happy, or to improve anything. They are doing it so that they retain control, tell you you have no rights to trade, sell, exchange, or modify the product you paid them money for, and can tell you when you are going to stop using it and buy a new one so they can maximize their profit potential and cost reductions to please their investors. They are not selling the same product with the same property rights attached, with the only difference being that one is more ecologically friendly. They are selling a different, alternative product with zero property rights attached, built in disposability, and convincing you it's all for a good cause. Of course it is. Their investors want a new 14 acre vacation estate. Shame it's so wasteful.

Note that I'm not anti-digital, in fact, outside Switch I've switched all digital on X1 and PS4. But I use it because the equation happens to work for me for a few reasons, not because I'm under any illusion it's any way less wasteful, or that the companies aren't trying to cheat me in the process. Also note, especially in the US, the bulk of the population doesn't even have internet performance that is viable for a digital landscape. And that's not going to change any time in the near future while the duopoly controls the internet infrastructure.