[Timmy] Tom I'm sorry to disturb you, but
we're in big trouble! [Tom] Mr. Nook. [Timmy] What? [Tom] It's Mr. Nook to you. [Tommy] We're sorry, Mr. Nook, but if we don't
do something soon, this New Island's going to make us go broke. [Tom] Don't worry your pretty little heads,
I got it all figured out. You just need somebody to come and fix everything
for us. And I got just the man to do it. [Tommy] That's a great idea, Mr. Nook. But how are you going to convince him to do
all that work all by himself? [Tom] It's simple. I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse. *Maniacal laugh* Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show… [Tom Nook] Hey you there, watching this video. You better hit that subscribe button, or else. I'm so glad we understand each other. Enjoy the video. Thanks Tom, Isn't he a hoot? No, no, not you, Blathers. Get out of here. Ah, Animal Crossing. The wildly successful social simulation game
that's been teaching us about financial responsibility, debt relief, and how to cheat in creative
ways so you can get great prices on stocks. I mean, turnips. And all of it is thanks to one very business
savvy tanooki, the one and only, Tom Nook. Who hands you a two story house with basement
in a crime free idyllic utopia all with no background checks or needing to prove your
income. It is probably the single most unrealistic
thing to ever happen in a video game. Sounds too good to be true, especially once
you start looking at real world housing prices. But people that have actually played the game
know that things aren't quite that simple. While Tom might be offering you this wonderful
house on a beautiful island in the middle of nowhere. It's not going to come cheap. In fact, when you first get there, he doesn't
give you the house, but a tent. And even then he tries to charge you nearly
50,000 bells for the thing. And the House, with its expansions, only get
more expensive with time. By the end of New Horizons, you'll have paid
5.696 million bells 8.966 million if you count all the storage expansions. Fortunately, just like in the real world,
there is a way to not be homeless while also having very little money to your name. You can get yourself a loan. Not from an official bank though, but from,
you know, the guy who's selling the house in the first place. Yeah, that is… that is not sketchy at all,
sure. And this isn't new behavior either. Every single Animal Crossing game starts this
exact same way: Tom gives you a home and then immediately starts charging you massive amounts
of bells for the home that he's basically forcing you to live in. It feels so sketchy that the Internet, even
brands Nook a crook, a grifter, even a mob boss taking advantage of our innocent little
selves. But there are those who defend Tom Nook in
his practices, namely the producer of Animal Crossing Hisashi Nogami. Quote from him: “I think he's a really,
really good guy… You do owe him money, but it's not like he
comes over and then asks you to pay him back. And he doesn't add interest in any of the
loans you may have. I think he really does stick around and wait
for you and then lets you take the lead for paying him back.” So which is it then? Is he just as much of a con artist as Redd? Or have we've been mischaracterizing our little
raccoon friend all along? I wanted to dig deeper than just the surface
level weeds of his character. Instead, I wanted to take a look at the thing
that really matters. His pocket book. Is Tom Nook actually ripping us off, or is
he just a simple businessman that's been misunderstood for decades? So grab yourself a bug net loyal theorists,
it's time we catch ourselves the truth. Let's just start off with the obvious question:
How much is this house that Tom Nook is so generously offering us really worth? Well, Houses in Animal Crossing work on a
grid system which allows for easy placement of items. The main room of your house, when fully upgraded,
is an 8X8 grid, with the three side rooms being 6X6, and then the basement and second
floor are both 10X6. Do not ask me how a house that's only five
by four from the outside gets a total of 292 grid squares inside of it. I don't know. Maybe Tom Nook is secretly a time lord using
TARDIS technology. But the crucial part of this is figuring out
the size of one grid square. A lot of people online, including an actual
mortgage comparison site from the UK, made the assumption that each grid square is one
meter by one meter or 3.3 feet by 3.3 feet. This would mean that our ground floor alone
is 64 square meters, which is pretty darn impressive. That said, it would also mean that all the
doorways in our house, which are the width of two grid squares, are two meters or 6.6
feet wide. Given the fact that average doors in the U.S.
are only three feet wide or just under one meter, either of the characters in this game
are dummy thicc or the math might be a little off. So I started to look around for items that
might help me get a sense of scale. And fortunately, there are a couple of items
that literally have the measurements in their names. There are two 50 inch TVs available for purchase. Now a 50 inch TV is not actually 50 inches
wide. The 50 inches actually refers to its diagonal
length, so they actually wind up being 44 inches wide or 111 centimeters. But regardless, this gives us something definitive
in the world that we can use to figure out the size of the rooms. I was able to determine that this 50 inch
TV is actually the same width as the doorway, two grid squares. So one grid square is therefore 22 inches
by 22 inches. That makes the eight by eight ground floor
30,976 square inches or in much more useful measurement, 215 square feet or 20 square
meters. If you keep going and calculate every room
in the house, you're going to be getting yourself a total size of 981 square feet or 91 square
meters. That is way smaller than all the estimates
that I saw circulating online. But it's actually still a pretty decently
sized property. As of writing this video, the median price
per square foot in the United States is $213. This then gives our property a value of about
$208,953, which may still sound like a lot for your first ever home. But in reality, it's kind of a bargain. In 2020, the average price of a starter home
in the U.S. was $233,400. So actually a little bit higher than what
we have in Animal Crossing. But the two are certainly in range of each
other. Then again, these prices aren't taking into
account the actual location of our New Horizons home. We're not in a city or a suburb, this is a
tropical island. And that's going to shoot the price of the
property like this sky high. In the Bahamas the price per square foot is
over double that of the average U.S. home, $500s per square foot. Making our luxury beachside island property
worth a massive $490,500 Now that is already a hefty chunk of change. But then here's Tom Nook selling you this
exact same house for 5.7 million. 5.7 million! That would be an upcharge of over 1,000%. That is ridiculous. He flew us out here to a deserted island and
then traps us here with no choice but to pay his insane prices just so we can have a roof
over our heads. Except that's not the full story. 5.7 million sounds like a lot of money for
sure, especially when the easiest thing you can sell is the local fruit that only goes
for 100 each. But that's not talking about dollars. That's in Tom Nook’s currency of Bells. 5.7 million U.S dollars would be a lot of
money for us to spend on a house like this. But if bells are more equal to, say, Indian
rupees, suddenly 5.7 million only costs us around $69,000. Nice. Still a decent amount of money, but far less
than the original 5.7 million and a fantastic price to pay for a $500,000 house. So what then is the real world value of Animal
Crossing Bells? The real issue with solving this here is that
it's hard to figure out the real world value of items when they're generic and unbranded,
the values just wind up being all over the place. There's an acoustic guitar, for instance,
that sells for 3,210 bells, but out in the real world, an acoustic guitar can sell for
as little as $30 or as high as $5,000. The range is just too high to get a definitive
answer on. But just like trying to find an item with
measurements, I wasn't deterred. I went through every single item to see if
any of them were clearly branded with real world brands. Until I came across one very specific item,
the only branded product in the game, all because Nintendo couldn't resist giving themselves
a little bit of self promo. In the store I found the Nintendo Switch,
an item with a set cost by Nintendo. In-game it costs 29,980 bells, and I could
just immediately compare that to the cost of the Switch upon its release in the US,
$300. I figured it was probably wise to check out
what it cost in Japan, provided that that was where this game was made. And wouldn't you know it? The original Switch was sold in Japan for
exactly ¥29,980, meaning that while bells may not be 1 to 1 with the U.S. dollar, they
are 1 to 1 with Japanese yen. I was even able to double check because there's
also a special edition Animal Crossing New Horizons Switch, both in-game and out in the
real world. In-game, it costs 35,960 bells. And when the same product was released in
2020, alongside New Horizons, it cost the exact same: ¥35,960. So now we've just got to figure out exchange
rates. When the game was released in 2020, one yen
was equal to 0.9 cents, which meant that ¥5.696 million would have been worth $52,383.54. However at the end of 2022, the yen plummeted
in value, making that same ¥5.696 million, now worth just over $42,000 today, roughly
0.7 cents to the yen. Which sucks for Tom Nook but is actually great
news for us. We are getting a nearly 1000 square foot beachfront
property for one fifth the real world average cost in the U.S. and over 11 times cheaper
than a property in the Bahamas. That is an absolute steal, but maybe this
is just part of a bigger scam. New Horizons isn't the first time that people
have questioned Tom Nook’s sales tactics. Maybe he caught on to public perception and
decided to take a loss this time, to let people get off his back. I see you, Tom Nook. You're not going to escape my net of justice. In the year 2000, the average home in the
U.S. cost $211,000, and in 2020, their average rose to $383,000. That is an 82% inflation increase, which is
just wild to think about. In only 20 years, property prices have gone
up by an average of $172,000. No wonder no one can afford to buy houses
anymore. Sad realities aside, this does give us a baseline
to work with. The original Animal Crossing for the Gamecube
was released back in 2001, In that original game there were no side rooms, so we only
needed to count the first, second and basement floors in the New Horizons house. Therefore costing us 4,042,000 bells. So if you work backwards using the real world
inflation rate of 82%, the original house should cost you around 2,221,000 bells. And if it's any more than that, well, then
Tom Nook is definitely taking us for a ride. But then I looked at the price and I was shocked. The final house in the original animal crossing
only costs you 1,413,600 bells. That is 800,000 bells less than Tom Nook should
have been charging. He was giving us awesome deals back then too
in the original game. Tom Nook is either an idiot or he's not really
a crook after all. A house of this size in the U.S. costs around
$200,000 to build. That's not including import costs of materials
due to it being on an island. That's one of the reasons why Hawaii has the
highest cost of living of all the 50 states. And to top it off, if you speak to him in
2015, Happy Home Designer. You'll find some dialog where he tells you
this. What little properties he’s making off of
you, he's then donating most of that too. He's barely making pennies off of us. He's not a crook. He's a saint. Maybe this is a lesson for all of us to stop
overthinking. Just because something seems too good to be
true doesn't mean the other shoe is going to drop. Rather than spending all of our time worrying
about Tom Nook’s sceam, maybe we just sit back, enjoy our new island home with no real
responsibilities other than paying back a very cheap interest free loan. But even though I would happily sit by a beach
enjoying a cocktail every day for the rest of my life, I couldn't help but wonder why
he was being so generous. And then it hit me like a present falling
out of the sky. What happens when we get on to the island? We're also given sole responsibility for raising
our island's ranking, encouraging new villagers to come and live there, building in town infrastructure
like museums, shops, bridges. This is why Tom Nook needs us here. He makes us an offer we can't refuse, giving
us a home so cheap he basically makes no profit. But it's worth it because of the value that
we put into the island. We're what's known as a loss leader. We're the first person to come to the island. Tom sells us a super cheap property. We make it all nice, and then he gets other
people interested. Which is when Tom can make all his money back
by jacking up the prices for everyone else. All because we got a cheap home for ourselves
and then did a bunch of manual labor. And the truth is, Tom needed us as a loss
leader because otherwise no one in their right mind would want to own the property on an
island like this. Because, let's be honest, who else is going
to move to a deserted island out in the middle of nowhere? Okay, well, a lot of us anti-social introverts,
sure, but like, there's not a Target there anywhere. And I don't think Hellofresh is going to be
delivering groceries out to the middle of the ocean any time soon. And all of this is without mentioning the
dangers of building a property on such a small island. The island is only 42 acres total, which means
that you're never really more than 200 meters or a quarter of a mile away from any coastline. This seems like it should be ideal. Who doesn't want to live a stone's throw away
from a beach? But actually it carries a huge amount of risk. There's a very real threat of sea levels rising,
something which is affecting coastal cities like Miami, which is actually the most at
risk city right now if climate change continues going the way it is. Rising sea levels means that even if our home
is in the dead center of our little island, might not be long before the coastline is
at our doorstep. The rising sea levels cause coastlines to
erode. What was stable ground now isn't so stable
and could eventually get washed into the ocean entirely. For an example, look no further than Dubai. 17 years ago, they started an incredibly ambitious
project; building a bunch of man made islands in the shape of the world map. The project was called, fittingly enough,
The World. But one major problem is that now the islands
are sinking back into the sea as the waters of the Persian Gulf rise. And even if the shores of your little slice
of paradise don't erode away, the rising sea levels will likely lead to coastal flooding
instead. Suddenly this great deal is not so great after
all. Tom Nook probably got the land cheap because
no one sensible would want to build property on such a risky small patch of sand. But he had himself a plan, get one sucker
who is desperate for their first home, one who didn't know about the risks, one who would
be so blown away by the size and location of the potential property and the cost of
it all. They would come all the way out there without
even batting an eyelid. And we fell for it hook, line and sinker. I guess we can always try to make it all up
on the resale? But if, or when, the worst does eventually
happen, there'll be good old Tom sitting pretty atop his pile of bells, probably able to claim
on some insurance, receive financial aid from the government, or at the very least pull
an Elon Musk and make the purchasing of all that land a tax write off. I guess he truly was an evil mastermind all
along. He was just playing a much longer game than
any of us realized. But hey, that's just a theory. A GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching. But the Animal Crossing conspiracies don't
have to stop there, my friends. We also did a video where we learn the truth
about another famous character, Zipper T. Bunny. Which you'll find on the left side of the
screen. Or if you like figuring out the value of fictional
currency. You can always watch our video on how rich
a Pokemon master truly is, that one is over on the right. As always, my friends, don't forget to subscribe
and I'll see you all next week.
