SEGA Europe is going green as it abandons all plastic boxes for future PC games

Bad news everyone: We’re all going to die and not even Captain Planet can save us. If there’s any silver lining to the impending ecological collapse of the planet though, it’s that I can sleep soundly at night knowing that for every bottle I forget to recycle, I take another step forward in making certain that I drag everyone down with me when the world eventually burns.

While I’m doing my best to be a supervillain, SEGA Europe is looking to not have a consumer base that is largely made up of people who happen to be on fire. With Football Manager proving to be an eco-friendly and edible success story last year, the house of Sonic the Hedgehog is looking to clean up its act even further.

As of right now, all PC games from the publisher will ship in cardboard boxes made from 100% recycled materials that can in turn be re-recycled like assets in a WWE game from 2K. Total War: Rome II will be the first such game released under this initiative, as SEGA Europe confirmed:

Like a maths question of addition reaching a sum of 69, that’s just nice. It’s worth noting that these boxes are indeed more expensive to produce, but they’re offset by environmental goodwill and overall lighter weight that makes for cheaper transportation costs so it’s a win win for both sides. Even in an age that is becoming increasingly more reliant on digital game purchases than ever before, the market for physically owning a license to play a game is still strong.

It’s a nice gesture from SEGA, and one that’ll hopefully be picked up on by other publishers as physical media sales wind down this decade. That, and if they could make bigger boxes like we used to get in the old days, that’d be rad as well.