Google's Pac-Man Doodle Cost $120M in Lost Work

Google's playable Pac-Man doodle left the world's bosses short-changed to the tune of $120 million last week, according to Tony Wright, maker of productivity tracking software Rescue Time. Wright calculates that the game caused users—most of whom, presumably, were at work and supposed to be doing something besides munching dots—to spend an extra 5 million hours on the site.

For that same cost, you could hire all 19,385 Google employees, Wright writes. "That includes Larry and Sergey, right down to the janitors. You could hire them for 6 weeks—imagine what you could build with that army of manpower." A Google exec said the company was "overwhelmed but not surprised" by the response to its doodle, the Telegraph reports. She added that the game, while no longer on the homepage, is permanently online at google.com/pacman.
(More Google stories.)