Technologies

Sony’s Horizon Forbidden West Tree-Planting Program Feels Like a Publicity Stunt

Commentary: Play a game. Plant a tree. Save the planet? Not so fast.

Do you want to help heal the Earth’s forests from the comfort of your home? For $69.99 you can do just that! At least, that appears to be the promise of Sony’s Play and Plant program, announced on Tuesday.

The program sees the electronics and video game giant partner with the Arbor Day Foundation, a tree-planting non-profit, to plant 288,000 trees across three reforestation projects in the United States. The catch is real-world trees will only be planted once a player gets through the tutorial in Horizon: Forbidden West and unlocks a specific in-game trophy.

The program received a good deal of press coverage from major video games websites with one outlet suggesting the program allows you to «save the real Earth while you save the virtual one.» Another suggested players have «the chance to do tangible good for the Earth.» Comments have been largely positive, too, with many lauding Sony’s initiative.

«Bout to go so hard in this game in the name of climate restoration,» one tweeter said.

But a brief glance beyond the headlines reveals this is video games greenwashing at its worst.

Reforestation is an admirable goal and the Arbor Day Foundation, which claims to have planted 500 million trees in its 50-year history, is no slouch when it comes to getting seedlings in the ground. But Sony’s program gives the false impression that buying a full-priced AAA video game is the way to help fix the planet and helps cast the company’s environmental actions in a positive light. It equates purchasing Horizon with doing good for the planet — such a simplification is grating and when you weigh this against Sony’s corporate environmental impact, the trophy-for-trees idea seems almost ludicrous.

«It’s a very common, and very effective strategy for companies to direct our focus and attention onto end users and consumers to distract us from the lack of effort from corporations,» notes Ben Abraham, a sustainability researcher and consultant who has been analyzing the carbon footprint of the video game industry.

Sony has committed to a «zero environmental footprint» goal by 2050, but is still emitting almost 1.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel power alone, according to its 2021 sustainability report. The vast majority of this coming from energy used at Sony sites across the world.

The report also details how much carbon dioxide is emitted as a result of consumers using Sony products, like TVs and game consoles. In 2020, these emissions were 19% higher than the year prior — and the highest they’ve been since 2016.

This was, the company notes, due to an increase in average TV screen size and «strong sales of the newly released PlayStation 5.» The PS5 is one of the most energy-intense consoles ever built, which means simply playing Horizon: Forbidden West long enough to get the necessary trophy is actually generating carbon dioxide in the short-term.

Let’s do some quick, back-of-the-napkin math: Unlocking the trophy will take about two hours of play time. If Horizon uses the same amount of energy per hour that Spider-Man: Miles Morales does (and it’s likely to use more considering it’s a brand new game), then you’re looking at around 400 watts of power to unlock the trophy and plant one tree. This is about the same as charging your smartphone 35 times. Now scale that up to 288,000 players and you’ve emitted around 90 tons of carbon dioxide to plant the trees.

That’s not an extreme amount, but is it really necessary? And beyond the planting, there’s also the follow-up. «There needs to be guarantees that number of trees gets planted [and] those trees get cared for and don’t die,» explains David Ellsworth, an ecologist and forestry expert at Western Sydney University in Australia. The benefits of planting trees don’t come when you unlock the trophy, but years or decades into the future. Will Sony ensure the planted trees make it to adulthood?

The tree-planting program is not limited to the US. Sony’s also partnering up with organizations in the UK, France, Germany, New Zealand and Canada for other tree-planting projects with different goals for players to reach. For instance, in New Zealand, a street artist has created Horizon artwork and each social media share will result in one tree, with a goal of planting 1,000. And in Canada, Sony will donate one Canadian dollar to the World Wildlife Fund to rehabilitate seagrass for every copy of the game sold — but only up to $100,000.

Which brings up another point. The first game in the series, Horizon: Zero Dawn, sold over 20 million copies. Why not just donate to the organization anyway, regardless of how many copies are sold, how many trophies get unlocked, how far players progress through the game or how many social media shares a piece of art receives?

Look past the feel good headlines and tweets and you find little cause for celebration. Sony is making inroads into reducing its environmental impact but the pace of progress is slow. It could have immediate and lasting impacts on the environment by rapidly decarbonizing and shifting to renewable energy to power its facilities, for instance. Instead, Sony putting the onus on players: Go buy our game so we can plant more trees.

It doesn’t deserve a trophy for that.

I reached out to Sony to clarify how tree growth, development and maintenance would be handled and whether this will be followed up by Sony in the future. I also asked whether players will know, in-game, that the trophy has contributed to the Play and Plant program. Sony did not respond to our requests for comment.

Technologies

Major Amazon Prime Benefit Faces Crackdown Next Month

Amazon plans to end its Prime Invitee program soon. Here’s how this could affect your deliveries.

If you’re using a friend or family member’s free Prime shipping and you don’t live in the same household, you might need to pay another monthly cost. According to Amazon’s updated customer service page, first reported by The Verge, the retail giant is ending its Prime Invitee benefit-sharing program on Oct. 1.

Amazon isn’t the first company to prevent membership sharing between family and friends. The e-commerce giant is just the latest to follow Netflix’s account-sharing crackdown. We also saw it done with Disney-Plus last year. While it’s unclear whether this change will work for Amazon, Netflix gained over 200,000 subscribers following its policy change.

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Amazon’s Prime Invitee program is being replaced by Amazon Family, which includes many of the same benefits. However, Amazon Family only works for up to two adults and four children living in the same «primary residential address» — a shared home. While you’ll still be able to use free shipping to send gifts elsewhere, your Prime Invitees will no longer be able to use the perk.

Read more: More Than Just Free Shipping: Here Are 19 Underrated Amazon Prime Perks

What this means for you

If you’re the beneficiary of someone else’s Prime Invitee benefits, you have one more month to take advantage of the current program before the changes take effect.

Starting in October, you’ll have to get your own Amazon Prime subscription in order to benefit from the company’s free shipping program. First-time subscribers get a year of Prime membership for $15, but you’ll be stuck shelling out $15 a month to maintain your subscription thereafter.

Read more: Your Free Pass to Prime Day Deals (No Membership Required)

Why is Amazon ending the Prime Invitee program?

This move follows shortly after Reuters reported that Amazon’s Prime account signups slowed down recently despite an extended July Prime Day event. While the company reported blowout sales numbers, new Prime subscriptions didn’t meet internal expectations. In the US, they fell short of last year’s signup metrics.

According to Reuters, Amazon registered 5.4 million US signups over the 21-day run-up to the Prime Day event, around 116,000 fewer than during the same period in 2024, and 106,000 below the company’s own goal, a roughly 2% decline in both metrics.

By forcing separate households to have their own subscriptions, Amazon could be looking to attract more Prime accounts after previously failing to do so.

The new Amazon Family program (previously known as Amazon Household) offers Prime benefits to up to two adults and four children in a single home, including free shipping, Prime Video, Prime Reading, Amazon Music and more. The subscription also includes benefits for certain third-party companies, such as GrubHub.

Impulse Buys Under $25 on Amazon That Make Surprisingly Great Gifts

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Technologies

Premiere Pro for Free: How Adobe’s New iPhone App Will Let You Edit Videos at No Cost

Adobe Premiere users will only have to pay for extra AI credits and cloud storage.

Thanks to social media apps like TikTok and Instagram, everyone is an video editor these days. And soon you won’t have to sit down at a laptop to use one of the most popular video editors on the market.

Adobe announced on Thursday that it is releasing a new video editing iPhone app named Premiere on Sept. 30. You can preorder the app now in the Apple App Store, with an Android app currently in development.

The iOS app should feel familiar to Premiere users, with its multitrack timeline and preview screen. The app can be used for all your usual video editing: trimming clips, overlaying audio and adding synchronized captions. You can also use Adobe’s new voice-to-sound effects tool and record voiceovers.

Premiere should be a big upgrade for Adobe users who have only used Premiere Rush, a barebones version of its video editor. As more content creators become mobile-first, Adobe is hoping to draw them in with revamped mobile apps.

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You should be able to use the Premiere iOS app for free. Adobe says you may need to pay for generative AI credits and additional storage, like through Adobe Creative Cloud, though more pricing info is expected closer to the Sept. 30 launch. This is very different from the desktop app, which starts at $23 per month.

A truly free Premiere mobile app would be a win for content creators, especially for anyone who wants to explore editing in Premiere but doesn’t want to pay for another subscription.

In an era of mobile-first content creators, tech companies have raced to introduce user-friendly mobile editing apps. TikTok creators use the ever-popular CapCut, with Meta adding its own contribution, a new app called Edits. Adobe has long been the industry standard for professional content creation and editing, but its mobile offerings were usually less feature-packed versions of its flagship programs under different names.

That changed this year as Adobe released true mobile versions of Photoshop and Firefly AI. The new Premiere app helps Adobe make a competitive entrance in a crowded market, in addition to giving loyal Adobe users a new way to access their tools on the go.

Adobe has also been focused on integrating generative AI into its software. Premiere Pro got its first-ever AI tool, generative extend, which uses AI to add a few extra seconds to clips you upload. It’s meant to help smooth transitions between clips, particularly when you might have turned off the recording a smidge too early and need a few extra seconds of film.

AI is a contentious issue among creators, with some voicing concerns over the training and deployment of AI models. Adobe’s Firefly AI has been fully integrated into the new Premiere iOS app, though the company’s AI guidelines state that it never trains on customer data and that its AI-generated content is commercially safe.

For more, check out what to know about the iOS and Android Photoshop apps and good alternatives to CapCut.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Saturday, Sept. 6

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Sept. 6.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s Mini Crossword is extra-long, as usual on Saturdays. And a couple of the clues were stumpers! Need answers? Read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.