Angry birds 1.5 billion, Angry Birds Costing $1.5 Billion in Lost Wages? Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic estimates that Rovio’s Angry Birds is costing businesses around $1.5 billion in lost wages. The estimate is based on a recent report by AYTM claiming that the bird-flinging game is played for 200 million minutes per day. That essentially equals to 16 years of continuous game play every hour of every day.According to the estimate, if 5-percent of those 200 million minutes are Americans playing Angry Birds at work, that’s around 43,333,333 on-the-clock hours of Angry Birds per year. Multiply that number by the hourly pay of America’s smartphone owners (a rather steep $35 average), then $1,516,666,667 worth of lost wages are lost due to the game. That’s more than the rumored valuation of Angry Birds developer Rovio which is estimated to be $1,200,000,000.
In addition to the total number of minutes played, AYTM’s report claims that, out of 1000 surveyed gamers, 32-percent feel somewhat relaxed when playing Angry Birds. 23-percent said that they felt “very” relaxed while 23-percent felt neither relaxed or anxious. 17-percent said they felt somewhat anxious while 6-percent felt very anxious.
The report also claims that 58-percent of the gamers surveyed felt that their moods improved after a round of flinging birds. 37-percent were found unchanged whereas 5-percent of the gamer moods actually worsened. Even more, the report concluded that unemployed gamers were 2X more likely to feel anxiety and 2.25X more likely to experience anger. However, gamers aged 18 to 24 were 5X more likely to be in a worse mood after playing Angry Birds than those 25 years and older.
Is Angry Birds addicting? 18-percent of the surveyed gamers said that they have never felt addicted when playing the game, whereas 54-percent chose the term “occasionally.” Only 15-percent said that they actually felt addicted, and 13-percent admitted to being totally addicted. Unfortunately, there’s no known medical cure to Angry Birds addiction other than deleting it off the device. Of course, there’s always the free version on Chrome, on Google+….