Google’s Cool Pac-Man game cost the world US$ 120 million.

Remember the Pac-Man you played in Google page that day? Okay, now let’s get into more details.

To celebrate Pac – Man 30th Anniversary, and to show cast HTML5, Google has made a ‘playable’ Google logo on their main search page Google.com.

As expected, many daily Google users would stop by for a brief seconds to relax and play the game. But apparently that cost a lot. So says The Rescue Time Blog.

“ This weekend, we took a hard look at Pac-Man D-Day and compared it with previous Fridays (before and after Google’s recent redesign) and found some noticeable differences. We took a random subset of our users (about 11,000 people spending about 3 million seconds on Google that day) The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on Friday. [...]

If we take Wolfram Alpha at its word, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. If we assume that our user base is representative, which means:

- Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
- $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
- For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
- $298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.” – The Rescue Time Blog

However, this all accounts in that we would be doing productive things instead of playing around in those short 30 plus seconds. If that’s true, then YouTube would have killed the world, since millions of visitors go in daily and watch videos.

[via Gizmodo]