Google Pac-Man doodle ‘cost economy $120m’ in lost productivity

LONDON - Workers playing Google’s animated Pac-Man doodle, designed to mark the game’s 30th birthday, has caused around 120 million dollars in lost productivity, according to an analyst.

Tony Wright, founder of Rescue Time, a tool that enables businesses to measure how time and attention is being spent, said that the launch of Animated Google logo designed to mark Pac-Man’s 30th birthday on Friday led to almost five million wasted hours and cost the economy around 120 million dollars.

He estimated that Google had around 505 million unique users on the day the Pac-Man Google Doodle went live.

And the game consumed 4,819,352 hours of employee time, costing the economy an estimated 120,483,800 dollars.For that same cost, you could hire all 19,385 Google employees. That includes Larry and Sergey, right down to the janitors. You could hire them for six weeks - imagine what you could build with that army of manpower,” the Telegraph quoted Wright as saying in a blog post.

Netizens were delighted to discover the animated Pac-Man doodle on Google’s home page last Friday-it was Google’s first interactive logo.

Web users could play the game by clicking “Insert coin”.

Marissa Mayer, vice president of user experience at Google, said the company had been “overwhelmed, but not surprised” by the reception given to the Pac-Man doodle.

“Due to popular demand, we’re making it permanently available at google.com/pacman,” she said. (ANI)