Say goodbye to that lovely fresh manual smell with future PS3 and Xbox 360 efforts from Ubisoft. The company today announced that it is going green in an “environmental initiative” to ditch traditional paper manuals, replacing them with an in-game digital equivalent.

Look for Shaun White Skateboarding, due out this holiday season, to be the first title to ship without a physical manual. Just how much precious resources do paper manuals consume? Citing internal data, Ubisoft explains:

Ubisoft’s digital game manuals will provide multiple benefits for the player and the environment. Including the game manual directly in the game will offer the player easier and more intuitive access to game information, as well as allow Ubisoft to provide gamers with a more robust manual. Ubisoft internal data shows that producing one ton of paper used in Ubisoft’s game manuals consumes an average of two tons of wood from 13 trees, with a net energy of 28 million BTU’s (equivalent to average heating and energy for one home/year), greenhouse gases equivalent of over 6,000 lbs of CO2, and wastewater of almost 15,000 gallons.

On the PC side of things, Ubisoft says it has partnered with Technimark to use a “100 percent-recycled polypropylene ecoTech DVD case,” starting with the release of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction.

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