According to a study by RescueTime, the fully-playable version of Pac-Man on Google’s home page may have cost the economy 4.8 million wasted man-hours.
The iconic game was put on Google’s home page on Friday and according to RescueTime it cost the economy a total of 4,819,352 man-hours and a whopping $120,483,800 in lost productivity.
RescueTime added that the money is enough to hire every single Google employee, including co-founders Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt for six weeks.
CNET’s Daniel Terdiman said that spending 36 extra seconds of time on Pac-Man is no big deal as an average person spends much more time on other activities like watching reality shows, games and other things. He noted that spending 36 seconds for a classic game like Pac Man still makes sense.
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Terdiman is more interested in knowing that how much time people lost because other people were playing Pac-Man, or because they couldn’t understand how to stop the game from running automatically.
He added that CNET had received lots of e-mails from people complaining that they couldn’t figure out how to shut off the game, and the theme music. Although Google modified the game so that the music could be stopped as lot of people were finding it difficult to work with music on.
Some companies and government agencies were forced to look for ways to disable Google’s home page because of policies banning game playing during office hours.