Except the study takes this into account and even goes on to say more vigorous users could consume more per year. We know some people be gaming hard.
Link in the article to academic study was dead.
Not sure why you chose to post that particular study, because it doesn't objectively prove that gaming is more energy intensive than crypto mining, especially when it was based on the hardware standards of <2015. The funniest part is if you read at the end of the abstract, it says:
"Savings of more than 75 % can be achieved via
premium efficiency components applied at the time of manufacture or via retrofit, while improving reliability and performance (nearly a doubling of performance per unit of energy)."
And then you look at the chart where it literally outlines energy saving strategies that companies are already employing now. The bolded is important because hardware releases post-2015 has continued to be incredibly efficient. Architectural changes has led to less electricity consumed than in previous years (Intel is the only exception for this considering how power-hungry their CPUs are). On top of that, PC enthusiasts/gamers are often swapping out their part for new and more efficient CPUs (as long as it is compatible with their existing parts).
And on top of that, that study
still doesn't not factor how varied the power consumption is on gaming PCs (and since they went so far as to include laptops and consoles into this, it's an even more baffling omission). It's not as if people are just gaming from the moment they wake up to the moment they sleep, vs. how GPUs are literally left on to do blockchains and mine for Bitcoin/Ethereum/what have you. The difference with mining is that it is cumulative, when there's a boom, there's
even more electricity consumption. So that 80TWh estimation is outdated. Not to mention, the growth rate of PC gaming is much smaller than the growth rate of crypto mining.
I don't get why people obsess over how much energy is consumed by X instead of where the energy comes from...which is what actually matters.
This is another good point, and one where researchers have admitted it's unclear.