Google Pac-Man Cost $120.5m In Lost Productivity

Users spent more than 4,819,352 hours of time playing Google’s free Pac-Man game last Friday, a time drain that could have cost companies nearly $120.5 million (£85.6m), according to time management tool RescueTime.

Google last Friday released its Pac-Man game as a playable doodle logo, allowing users to click the insert coin button and begin gobbling ghosts with the hungry, yellow dot.

Google pledged to leave up the doodle only through the weekend, but the Atari and arcade favourite proved so popular that the search engine agreed to offer it forever at its own webpage here.

RescueTime crunched some numbers and found that the average Google users spent 36 seconds more on Google.com on its release day, which is where the original Pac-Man game was hosted.

For the baseline, the company said the average Google user spends only four and a half active minutes on Google search per day, conducting 22 page views. This is equal to roughly 11 seconds of attention invested in each Google page view.

Looking at a random subset of its users, or 11,000 people spending three million seconds on Google.com Friday, the average user spent 36 seconds more on Google.com Friday. RescueTime concluded Pac-Man was the reason for the gross time bump.

“Thankfully, Google tossed out the logo with pretty low ‘perceived affordance’ – they put an ‘insert coin’ button next to the search button, but I imagine most users missed that,” RescueTime founder Tony Wright said earlier this week.

“In fact, I’d wager that 75 percent of the people who saw the logo had no idea that you could actually play it. Which the world should be thankful for.”

Taking Wolfram Alpha’s tally that Google had some 504,703,000 unique visitors on Sunday, May 23, RescueTime said Pac-Man ate up 4,819,352 hours of time beyond the 33.6 million daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day.

Pac-Man consumed $120,483,800 (£83,567,808) in costs for the lost work time, where the average Google user is paid $25 (£17.34) per hour. If the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee, the tally climbs to $298,803,988 (£207,251,051).

The numbers should give some employers pause to wonder what their worker bees are doing in the hive.

By the same token, these stats might push Google to offer more classic Atari games on its website. Our vote for the next game goes to Centipede.