thatgamecompany and The Ocean Cleanup Celebrate Five Years of Partnership During Days of Nature 2025
Independent Game Company and Its Community of Players Have Helped Raise Nearly $2.5 Million For The Ocean Cleanup – A Non-Profit Which Has So Far Removed 46 Million Pounds of Waste from Oceans and Rivers Worldwide
“This partnership continues to reinforce our belief that games should be a force for good,” said Tim Nixon, Online Experience Director of thatgamecompany. “The Sky community has taken what they do best — spreading kindness — and turned it into real-world impact, which I couldn’t be more proud of.”
Each Days of Nature event brings an in-game story that reflects a pressing environmental issue. From April 28 through May 18, Sky players will return to the Sanctuary Islands, where oil-slicked waters and pollution threaten sea creatures. Guided by the game’s signature themes of empathy and collaboration, players work together to restore balance, rescuing sea life and healing damaged waters, one small act of kindness at a time.
“The Ocean Cleanup builds scalable solutions, and it’s partnerships like this that help fuel our mission and deliver real impact,” said Nisha Bakker, Director of Partnerships, at The Ocean Cleanup. “Sky inspires people to want to take action, so we’re responding to that urgency and optimism, and by working together, we are making progress toward a cleaner future for our oceans and rivers.”
Playing with Purpose
Last year’s event told the story of how The Ocean Cleanup’s Interceptor™ barrier in Guatemala, engineered to block plastic waste from entering the ocean, was ultimately overwhelmed and subsequently broke down during heavy seasonal rains. Undeterred, their team returned with an innovative solution: the Interceptor™ Barricade, which went on to capture nearly 20 million pounds of trash in its first few months.
That spirit of resilience inspired the design for the event. Players joined in-game Spirits to construct a barrier preventing pollution from spreading downstream — clearing debris, protecting wildlife, and confronting a dark force drawn to the destruction.
To honor five years of a special partnership, Sky has released a new video that captures the story of this collaboration, the power of collective impact, and how play can inspire purpose. Additional details about the partnership and its real-world impact can be found on Sky’s website.
For more information on Days of Nature, visit Sky’s official blog and check out the new trailer.
Sky: Children of the Light is available to play on PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, and the App Store and Google Play Store. Fans can follow @thatSkygame on X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, join its Discord community, or follow @thatgamecompany on Twitch to stay informed on Sky: Children of the Light updates.
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About thatgamecompany
thatgamecompany is committed to developing broadly accessible, artistic, emotional, and enriching experiences, including award-winning titles Flow, Flower, Journey, and Sky: Children of the Light. Its accolades include induction into the Smithsonian’s permanent collection and the Museum of Modern Art. It hopes to expand the range of emotional experiences possible in video games, so that it can be enjoyed and loved by people of all ages, cultures, and backgrounds.
About The Ocean Cleanup
The Ocean Cleanup is an international, mission-driven, non-profit that develops and scales technologies to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. They aim to achieve this goal through a dual strategy: intercepting in rivers to stop the flow and cleaning up what has already accumulated in the ocean. For the latter, The Ocean Cleanup develops and deploys large-scale systems to efficiently concentrate the plastic for periodic removal. This plastic is tracked and traced to certify claims of origin when recycling it into new products. To curb the tide via rivers, The Ocean Cleanup has developed Interceptor™ Solutions to halt and extract riverine plastic before it reaches the ocean. As of March 2025, the non-profit has collected over 21 million kilograms (46.2 million pounds) of trash from aquatic ecosystems around the world. Founded in 2013 by Boyan Slat, The Ocean Cleanup now employs a broadly multi-disciplined team of approximately 200 people. The organization is headquartered in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and opened its first regional office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2023.