Pay For Play

Online gamers are everywhere. Either you know one, or you are one. According to Market researcher NPD Group the average number of hours spent on online gaming has risen for the third consecutive year. That bodes well for this fast-growing segment of the game industry, which includes everything from casual online poker games to hardcore multiplayer online matches on the game consoles but doesn’t bode as well for employers while users are often playing these games from work.

The average number of hours per week that users play online games has gone up from 7.3 hours in 2009 to 8 hours in 2010. The majority of games played are on the PC. This includes free games like those associated with online social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Zynga, which is the primary game portal from the most popular social media websites has more than 200 million individaul active users playing games each month. Often these games are played during business hours. Employers are more and more concerned about time wasted in the workplace. Research estimate this employee waste being at about 2.09 hours per day per employee.

The combination of web filtering with enhanced reporting and desktop monitoring is what employers need to use in order to keep control over what can amount to millions of dollars lost each and every year. With enforcable policies in place, once employees are told they are being monitored, the time wasted online is immediately cut to a fraction of what it was previously.

One Response to “Pay For Play”

1. Jack Holder says:

   July 2, 2010 at 3:17 pm

   This is a great point. I know in my company, we probably lose more productive time to software applications that run locally then to web surfing, especially since we have implemented web filtering.

   The “higher ups” insist that people have administrator permissions on their machines so people end up installing all kinds of games and other time wasters (to say nothing of native apps like Minesweeper and Solitaire).

   Anything that allows us to limit programs running at the endpoint is a Godsend in my mind as it saves a lot of our already overstretched IT resources from having to deal with more problems.