Google Pac-Man Costs $120,483,800 in Productivity

By Queuebot in Blogs & Internet, Money & Finance, Toys on May 25, 2010 at 8:18 pm

Google’s celebration of Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary was fun, enabling people to play Pac-Man on their main search page, either as a one- or two-player game. And people certainly took advantage of the opportunity, spending approximately 4,819,352 hours on the game alone. The result is approximately $120 million in productivity lost, in one day.

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

Link – via gizmodo

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by nmiller.

Tags: google, money, pac-man, productivity

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Steohawk
May 25th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
I seriously doubt that number is accurate, especially since there’s no way of actually knowing that “fact”.
Miss Cellania
May 25th, 2010 at 9:23 pm
You can still play the Google Pac-man.
http://www.google.com/pacman/
Johnny Cat
May 25th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
Their map is challenging.
Gauldar
May 26th, 2010 at 6:23 am
I sometimes get caught on the edges.
Ashley
May 26th, 2010 at 6:26 am
I call BS. I played the game and didn’t lose any productivity. Why? Because it’s summer, and I’m a student without a job. Not everyone logging those hours was at work.
Graystone2000
May 26th, 2010 at 6:30 am
And why is anything not work not productive? We would gain HUGE productivity if we stopped eating and sleeping… It’s be a VERY productive few weeks until we all dropped dead.

Imagine all the lost productivity during sex and raising children? Is playing pac man with your child a bonding experience or a waste of time?

Seriously.. strap my corpse to the MACHINE until I rot away….
ted
May 26th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
It probably kept a few people away from Facebook during that time, so that’s a bonus. Graystone2000, you need to buy a stress ball.
Vonskippy
May 26th, 2010 at 5:00 pm
“Seriously.. strap my corpse to the MACHINE until I rot away….”

Just be sure to rot away on your own time, ok?
Miss Cellania
May 26th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
Yes, the folks who came up with these stats failed to take into account the fact that all those people who played Pac-Man would have been wasting time on some other website otherwise.
ted
May 26th, 2010 at 7:46 pm
:O It’s never a waste of time on Neatorama.

Maybe they were keeping track of a loss in Farmville productivity.
Snarlz
May 26th, 2010 at 8:01 pm
Personally I’m pretty glad pacman isn’t on the Google page anymore. My bf and I made an arrangement.
No Google search could be completed until a level of pacman was completed (without fail).
You want to talk about an unproductive day…
Arcfire
May 30th, 2010 at 5:19 am
I would have to agree with Greystone, it seems like corperations find more and more ways to cut corners while producing a much inferior product compared to simular ones 30 years ago, sure they do more things but the dont last as long. But instead of seeing how cool it was to make a playable logo for the 35th anni of Pacman, the blogger had to comment on lost productivity instead. Sad day for America. Thanks for the link Miss Cellania! Now I can still play it!

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