While working on the gaming issue, someone camp up with the idea of calculating how much gaming costs us all in hard cash. Now this is obviously ridiculous, and cannot be calculated without going insane, but since a lot of people in our office seem to waste time with FarmVille, we decided to calculate how much that silly game costs India on a yearly basis. We chose not to calculate the same for our sessions of Quake III, because that actually builds motor skills, team spirit, and a whole lot of other goodness – in case the bosses are reading this. It might not matter much to most of us, but India loses an exorbitant amount of money thanks to people playing Farmville. Now this is no regular calculation, and of course it will be anything but accurate, but we decided that we’d rather err on the side of caution, and be extremely conservative with our suppositions – the final figure will no doubt be a lot higher than what we arrive at. Read on to find out how and just how much India Cost because of gaming –

How many Indian Farmers?

To get anywhere, we’ll first have to find out roughly how many people in India play Farmville, for this, we’ll go both with Zynga’s global stats and the stats given out by Zynga India Head, Shan Kadavil. We have numbers available for monthly Zynga logins globally (250 million), monthly Farmville logins globally (60 million) and daily Zynga logins from India (1.5 million). Since Farmville accounts for 24 percent of the monthly Zynga logins globally, let’s apply the same percentage for the daily Zynga logins from India. Farmville probably accounts for a higher percentage of traffic in India given its popularity here. We’ll ignore that for now though, and like we said earlier, try and work out a rough figure to work with, 24 percentage of 15,00,000 works out to around 3,60,000 Indians playing Farmville daily.

Workaholics Anonymous

We went through various studies, and found that about 40 percentages of all Indians online using a PC, log in from their workplace during work hours. Applying the nationwide average to our Farmville users despite logic and several studies suggesting that the numbers are probably must higher we arrive at the following figure –

3,60,000 * 40% = 1,44,000 users playing Farmville at work daily

Give us our daily wages!

According to Zynga’s director of Brand advertising, Manny Anekal, the average time spent by an Indian playing Farmville is 68 minutes a day. Assuming that most of us office going Indians work 8 hours a day, that’s –

(68/480) * 100 = 14.17 percent of their work day on Farmville

Now the per capita income in India is INR 46,492 and according to another study, the average income of an Indian who has access to internet is 3.2 times the national average. This means –

3.2 * 46,492 = INR 1,48,774 is the average annual salary of Farmville players.

The average daily income thus works out to 1,48,774 / 365 = INR 406.60 since every Farmville player, on average, spends 14.17 percent of their working day on it, this translates to –

(14.16 / 100) * 406.60 = INR 57.743 is being wasted per person on Farmville every day!

For the whole of India that works out to –

1,44,000 * 57.743 = INR 83,14,992 in wasted wages per day.

Bottomlines

Based on another study, corporate Indian companies pay their employees an average salary of INR 4.8 Lakh per annum, and make a profit of INR 6 lakh per annum per employee. This means the profit to salary ratio per employee works out to 6 / 4.8 = 1.25 – for every INR 100 a company pays you, they expect a profit of INR 125. Applying that ratio to the amount of wasted wages per day we get a figure of –

1.25 * 83,14,992 = INR 103,93,740 is being lost in terms of Indian company profit per day.

Power Struggles

Moving on, an average PC running a CRT monitor will consume 100W per hour, which will consume 0.1 units. Based on a study, 35 percent of visitors are still using CRT resolutions – however, to be conservative again, we’ve assumed that only 30 percent of people playing Farmville are on CRT monitors and the rest on LCDs. The average PC with LCD monitors uses about 70W per hour, or 0.07 units. Thus we’re assuming that of all the 3,60,000 * 30% = 1,08,000 are on CRT while 2,52,000 are on LCDs. Now the average cost per unit of electricity across India is INR 5.5. Thus 68 minutes of Farmville per day would work out as –

(5.5 * 1,08,000 * .1 * 68 / 60) + (5.5 * 5,52,000 * 0.07 * 68 / 60) = 68,320 + 1,09,956 = INR 1,78,276 per day in electric bills.

This is conservative, because we’re taking a very low power PC and not even counting the power that speaker draw when you play it with sound.

Totaling up

How much Indian pays to play Farmville everyday –

Employee wages: INR 83,14,992

Company Losses: INR 103,93,740

Electric Bill: INR 1,78,276

Total: INR 1,88,87,008 daily

How much India pays to play Farmville every year –

INR 1,88,87,008 * 365 = INR 689,37,57,920

Yeah, almost 7000 Million rupees. This doesn’t even take into account the real money being spent on micro transactions within Farmville. The next time you consider logging into Farmville, ask yourself – is this really important? Like INR 7000 million important?

References



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