Just about everyone knows Angry Birds. Even if you’re not a fan of the game, you’ve probably come across various merchandize for the popular game, such as t-shirts, speakers, phone casings and even a theme park of its own! While we can’t be sure if Rovio could have foreseen their game take off in such a huge way, we’re sure that no one could have foreseen the game actually having a negative impact on the economy.
Apparently there has been a report that said that Americans play an average of 200 million minutes of Angry Birds a day, and based on that astounding figure, Alex Madrigal, a writer for The Atlantic, set out to discover how much productivity is lost while playing Angry Birds. As you can see in the picture above, he has done various calculations and it seems that the amount of productivity lost at the end of the day is around $1.5 billion.
Of course this is by no means a concrete figure, and we don’t think it’s meant to be taken seriously. It looks like it’s just to highlight the amount of time that we spend everyday playing Angry Birds when we could have been more productive at work. Then again, if it wasn’t Angry Birds it would have probably been something else. People have found ways to slack off at work before smartphones came along, and ten years down the line it will probably be something else.
Angry Bird players out there, do you think Alex Madrigal’s estimates are right, and that you spend 5% of your time at work playing Angry Birds?
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