(Subtitles by Swan Htet)
Dear Every Game Company on planet Earth, today
We're doing a video that has hands-down the most fun most ambitious and most like oMFG
This is way too much material to cover in one video and promise tomorrow (no way)
Topic I've ever tried to do the question is simple enough: "Who is the richest video game character of all time?"
And no, I don't mean rich as in the most well-rounded fully conceived character clearly
That's Barbie from Barbie's horse adventures Wild Horse Rescue!
I'm talking rich as in Dollars, Bucks , Cash, Crowns, Coins, Gold, Gil, Rupees, Rings, and in almost every other case.
"credits" for some reason, so place your bets now and your preferred fictional denomination because it's time for:
"Lifestyles of the RICH and POLYGONAL"
(Music)
The list of characters I generated for this video is MASSIVE.
I reached out and got great suggestions from my Discord server and my Twitter followers to help fill out the
Ranks, because as soon as I started building my own list,
It seemed inevitable that I'd forget somebody super obvious and then everyone would unsubscribe my
Credibility as someone who does video game math you watch on your phone while you Boop would go well in the toilet I'd get addicted
To Tide Pods and end up dying in a laundromat gutter alone!
And thoroughly,
Ratioed and nobody would come to my funeral because I'm going to be cremated in a time machine with the dial set to RANDOM
my original list as it sits is 50 characters long and
Calculating the net worth of each one at the absolute fastest rate. I could math took me at least 40 minutes
Whereas some took me over 5 hours!
So before we get into the meat of the episode and start running down the first entries I have to tell you about my methodology
And my limitations first, there are a lot of factors at play here and making these comparisons as fair as possible is vital
so while we may include:
generic game protagonists like Railroad Tycoon, The Courier and Adam Jensen
We wanted to avoid crediting any of the get-rich-quick schemes that you may find online.
Another issue is that from an in world perspective our time spent playing and our in-game time
don't always match almost every single game with a day/night cycle has what's called a "Time Scale"
Which is basically how many times faster than our real world,
does the game world go. Fallout and Skyrim have a time scale of 20 .The Witcher has one at 15. Breath of the Wilds is 60.
and destinies is turned off for some reason :(
So for our purposes,
we'll be dividing all time spent playing in our real world by the time scale in order to get a more accurate picture of a
Character's well to return their liquid assets as it were especially in the case of Mario Sunshine in addition
We're gonna be limiting the number of hours any character can work in a day because nobody, NOBODY works
24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The Pew analysis of the Labor Department estimates that the average
American employee works 38.7 hours a week.
46.8 weeks a year with an average of
1811.16 hours per years of working hours
We'll be multiplying this by 50 to get a 50-year career total for all player characters again
It doesn't matter how long we work our characters as long as it is consistent
We can't have Scrooge McDuck with his average waterfowl lifespan of 5 to 10 years
Go up against let's say a mere immortal Dracula from the Castlevania series
Although that does give me a good slash fake ID
also, we're gonna be ranking by 2019 United States Dollars because like no one else would you be doing it.
USA! USA!
We're number 1! ( R.I.P Stefán Karl Stefánsson) for a few more months!!
EPIC MUSIK
We'll be
avoiding
Hacky exploits like stealing houses because of a bug, finding secret chests that shouldn't be available to players and the good old player dot add
item f1 bajillion. In-game methods that are legitimate only.
I also relied on a lot of different sources and other people's work to do these calculations
so keep an eye glued to the bottom of the screen for citations (Hi there!) when needed and the final and I think arguably most
Important piece of the process to keep in mind here is that we're going to be measuring in world purchasing power as a pure
Mathematical value not using a common commodity like gold or silver
measuring its mass and just saying "Well if you teleported that much gold to the United States and sold it you'd be
1/18 of Jeff Bezos rich!" instead,
We're gonna build a case for what the in-game currency would be worth in our world
the reason for this is
Simultaneously simple and complex and it boils down to what currency is at its core
According to thomas greco and a book aptly named "MONEY". What makes a currency a currency is that it fulfils three core functions,
1. It's a medium of exchange
2. It's a unit of account and 3.it's a store of value for these reasons gold and sometimes silver became a popular
early form of currency gold was relatively scarce, but still
semi plentiful it's easy to melt, shape and form into distinct amounts, and it doesn't corrode
So gold worked its way into our collective wallets early on because our primitive fires in kilms
Could melt it into ingots or bars or coins pretty easily
(sidenote: It's also an excellent conductor of electricity which is why so many
Renaissance noblemen protected their treasures by hooking them up to car batteries) of elements with a similar scarcity silver tarnishes which reduces its usefulness and
platinum only melts at
1768 degrees Celsius
So unless you're from a pretty advanced civilization no-one's gonna be making any grilled platinum sandwiches anytime soon. Gold melts at a much cooler
1,000-ish Celsius making it much more attainable for ancient humans these. For reasons according to chemist Cenac Kumar: if we were to rewind
history and start everything over, gold would have AGAIN
Inevitably become our original first standardized currency material. Machine set in theory,
It should be the perfect thing to measure video game wealth by if we can right? No, no! No! NO! you idiot!
Okay, you know, okay. I'm sorry. Please don't leave.
I will explain the value of 1kg of gold in the United States and 2019 does not accurately
reflect the purchasing power of a crown in The Witcher or a credit in Mass Effect. Gold's only real purpose in human
history was a serve as a physical symbol to facilitate trade and store value
It kept you from having to literally bring all of your goats to market if you wanted to trade for a cow!
But gold in itself has no constant inherent value. There's no guarantee
That gold is so important, rare or prized among all video game worlds.
In fact, one over powered game protagonists hoarding all the game world's gold would effectively make it
valueless because it's just sitting in a giant vault
It's not circulating as a currency. In a more realistic economy the
NPC's would start trading with something else and all of your endgame
hoarding would have been for nothing unless of course you are Scroge McDuck in which case, go on and enjoy diving into your vault of
worthless gold and snapping your neck in the process and comparing that highly concentrated
hoard of gold to the value of gold in our world where gold has become pretty evenly distributed over the centuries seems like faulty logic,
Especially considering gold is no longer used as a currency ANYWHERE.
So to compare all of these
Wildly different game worlds fairly, we have to find something that they all have in common; not a shiny metal
something with intrinsic value. A value
that doesn't change radically based on things like stock markets or sex scandals in short as Hank Mendelsohn a
Wholesale gold trader at gold standard watches and jewelry in New York City put it "You can't live in it, You can't eat it."
the point is we're gonna be looking instead at the
Monetary value of the resources that mattered the most to human beings Food, Water, Shelter
Mason jars with the pixie trapped in it against her will whose soul you suck out if you get to zero hearts
You know things that keep us alive and things that keep you alive in post-apocalyptic wasteland. That's right
We're gonna start by debunking one of my favorite theories of Mat's right out the radioactive gate The value of a Bottle Cap,
because no matter how many ghouls you sweet-talked or robots who rob the Fallout 4 protagonist is all the way at the bottom of our
list, you could call them the poorest of the rich.
I'm actually kind of just being a little cheeky because Mat did his video before Fallout 4 was even out and Fallout, New Vegas
takes place across the country in an entirely different
economy. An economy that actually does value gold and where the value of bottle caps might
arguably be higher. In fact before the Brotherhood of Steel destroyed the new California Republic's gold reserves. Their currency was fully gold-backed.
So honestly, his method was pretty solid. That being said I wanted to get the latest cannon from a game
THAT DOESN"T SUCK! and of course on one of the so discord here at the channel because I am chaos incarnate
So taking our cues from Fallout 4
We're gonna key in on the most important resource in the post nuclear wasteland: Water
Let's compare the buying power of a bottle cap to the economy of another country with a poor supply of clean water
Uganda (do yu kno de wae?) a country where
40% of the population
Has to travel 30 minutes to get clean drinking water.
An efficient cap farming setup in Fallout 4 can yield 3,000 caps per hour times 4527.9
hours the characters total career hours divided by timescale of 20 yields a total fortune of
13,583,700,
sticky, used soda caps by the time our
wastelander reaches
retirement age a bottle of water and fall out cost 20 caps in a bottle of water in Uganda cost 28 cents making each
Cap equivalent to 1.4 cents bringing our total lifelong earnings to whopping
$190,171.80 ,
which is
miniscule but actually makes sense given that the economy of Fallout has been completely decimated by Nuclear War
There's just less stuff out there and a lot of it is poison
So that's your lot sole survivor work hard your whole post vault life and only make enough to buy a house and a mid-tier
Chicago suburb, next up the bat is Luigi, which damn, a another debunked Game Theory episode. Oh, well, I helped research that one
So I guess it's more of a cell phone in that case
Luigi was tricky because now we have to figure out the value of COINS not nickels or quarters just COINS
Generally my method of comparing this to something in-game with real-world value, it's a major
obstacle in this phase because there's just not a lot of real-world
analogues in the Mario franchises especially ones that are close to the core Canon. Have you priced Fire Flowers or Invincibility Stars lately?
No, that's right. You haven't in fact not a ton of Mario games even let you buy stuff with coins
It's mostly just a points and 1ups machine, not a true currency of exchange and while
it would just lead Jingle my Jollies to divide the average cost of a human life of
9.1 million by
100 COINS in order to get a cost per coin value and literally tell you how many Mario COINS your life is worth.
I'm not sure that's actually the best way to go about it. Naturally
I sought out an item shop as you know
The Mario RPG spin-offs do have items you can buy but it's still very hard to find something
Comparable to our real world because Mario is and always has been a vibrant cornucopia of NONSENSE!
But at long last I found one item from Super Mario RPG
Legend of the Seven Stars that was both for purchase and existed in our world, "You can't live in it,
You can't eat it" and you can only drink it if you melt it down, but as our best bet,
Cymbals. In this game cymbals are a weapon for the character Malo
and have a set purchase price by comparing that to the average cost of cymbals on
Amazon of a similar size, 70 bucks
I can finally get a decent estimate of the value of a coin in mario world or Dinosaur Land
whatever. an RPG cymbals cost 42 COINS making each coin worth about a buck sixty-six..
This, then revalues the max G's you can get from loot in Luigi's Mansion
to $47,463 and since 1 coin there is worth 5,000 G's revaluing our
2017 video's appraisal of Luigi's Mansion into 2019 dollars brings us from
$986,575.13 to $1,011,140.85
and makes Luigi's total net worth a still pretty
Enviable $1,058,604 and 18 cents. BAM!!!
Luigi could buy and sell the sole survivors radiated ass five times over someone just got Stim Pact
You know like a super. Okay next to the I'm sorry about that,
Of course Luigi's cool mill is dwarfed by his brothers net worth and if this list from Nintendo suite is correct
And I'm a presume it is because I am not gonna count myself
There's a total of 10,071,473 COINS in every single Mario game in our little plumber's
35-year career if he collected them all he'd be worth over
$16,785,788 and 33 cents ever the player two
Luigi just be glad your name doesn't have a "Wa" in front of it or they wouldn't even let you in Smash,
the Dovahkiin in Skyrim clocks in at a unbelievable 37.4 million bucks
which we figured out by: believe it or not valuing potatoes which you can eat AND drink
If you're patient enough, the average potato is worth one coin in Skyrim and fifty-five cents in the u.s respectivly.
the most efficient farming method yields 15,000 gold per real world hour and you got a divide by time scale 20
So we get a career of 4,527.9 real-world hours.
We're using the term real world loosely here. I have 82 hours on Skyrim
So by our standard I've just begun my first week of a long LONG career
If you're boring enough to waste that many hours of your life farming gold coins in Skyrim you'd end up with
67.9 million septums or 37.4 bucks and zero functional relationships
Next is a major upset with Steve or Alex the protagonist from Minecraft who you probably expected to be in the #1 spot
But remember we're estimating purchasing power not gold reserves
If we were measuring purely by Gold or even diamonds they'd probably be way up there
But Gold is not the main currency in Minecraft, Emeralds are.
Emeralds are worth on average about 20 pieces of wheat. 2 wheat makes a batch of 8 cookies
Which means they produce 42.6 grams of flour 21 grams per piece or
0.11% of the yield of a bushel of wheat which costs $5.21 on the open market
Making a unit of wheat worth about a penny. That puts an emeralds worth at about
11.6 cents using the most efficient emerald farming method of:
300,000 per hour that gives us a total fortune of 377,000,000 Emeralds or $44,000,000,
but the real tragedy of all of this for Steve and Alex is for all their wealth
they still can't buy a round-head The Sims 4 protagonist is my
Absolute fricking favorite of the bunch because they make their money
No joke by painting, you know
The classic archetype of the fabulously wealthy artist in a method detailed by Purple Turtle Girl on YouTube,
You're capable of making 2265.8 and
Simolians per day selling your paintings. A bathtub in The Sims is 250 Simolians
and the same one in real life is 350 bucks given a 50-year career
That's a grand total of 41.3 million Simolians or 57.9 million dollars!
Now if painting is too much work for you, don't worry, you can also apparently just be poor move into a rich person's house
Kick them out by force and sell all their stuff. You won't be getting nearly as rich but it's Super SUPERR easy and freakin hilarious
Alright, how far are we? How many did we get through? Do we get through 25? What?
We only got through seven? Arggg!!!!!!!!!
But I have a list of 50 characters and I cant just like skim over the methods or people wont believe me
And I also can't make a 90 minute(1 hour and a half) video because that would be a movie and film is dead
And damn it, I'm almost out of time
Oh what am i gonna do what an i gonna do.
I'm freaking out right now. I don't have a plan. This was a stupid idea. Its a stupid STUPID idea!
I'm so so screwed. I can taste the Tide Pods already. Okay. wait a minute, wait a minute.
Okay. Okay. What if what if we make a thing out of this like a, like a, like a,
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Miniseries like The Quest to Find the Richest Video Game Character of all time or some stupid crap like that...
because that could that could work right like just pretend it was
my plan all along and then I'm not like I'm, a half hazzard mess of a person
Running at the end of my rope all the time
All right. Okay. Okay. Turn it turn the mic back on. What what do you mean is still rolling?
This whole time. Okay. Well, we'll edit it out later, okay
We're just about done with today's first episode of a totally pre-planned multi-part series
Just give you a small, small taste of what's to come,
We've got millionaire ten-year-old billionaires who don't shower and I swear to God true blue
Mathematical trillionaires. Oh and we've got Vladimir Putin
Maybe I'll de-bunk MatPat at a few dozen more times
so you know subscribe to the channel
so you don't miss it when I run out of other ideas for videos and have to circle back
To this. Oh, and I'm also going to be releasing my math for these episodes
Specifically on my discord server so you can pick me apart in real time
And maybe come up with the stuff I missed
so if you want to help me tackle this project in particular King K rool and Donkey Kong because I have no
idea how to value a banana back currency hop on over to my discord: Discord.gg/TheSCIENCE
and that's all for now go earn those potatoes
sincerely, Austin
It seemed inevitable that I'd forget somebody super obvious and everyone would uns-
It seemed inevitable that I would forget somebody super obvious and then everyone would uns-s-
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
That I'd forget somebody super obvious and then everyone would unsubscr-
AAAAAAAAAAAAA
why is it so hard to say! It seemed inevitable that I'd forget somebody super obvious and then everyone would uh AAAAAAAAAAA
It seemed inevitable that I'd forget somebody super obvious and then everyone would unsub. Everyone would unsubscribe
(le end)