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If GTA V happened in real life would it cost more than the destruction of Metropolis in
Man of Steel?
Let's find out.
How much would the damage cost society in GTA V if it happened in real life?
And I'm talking strictly about the stuff that happens in the main storyline.
Not the infinite amount of damage you can do running around blowing up hookers with
RPGs.
Sorry, hookers, you're just so much fun to blow up with RPGs!
According to a study in the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, "*** By Numbers," an average
*** in the United States costs, taking into account victim, justice and offender
productivity,
on average 17 million dollars.
The estimation comes from a sample of 654 convicted and incarcerated homicide offenders
across 8 states and a very long a comprehensive formula.
If you want more information, link in the doobleedoo.
For our purposes, we're going to take the average numbers from this article to determine
some of the damage costs behind GTA V's storyline.
To answer this question we needed to pull data for how many people are killed, injured,
how much property damage is done, how much property is stolen and how much stock fraud
goes on.
Let's also assume that all three protagonists are apprehended at the end of the storyline
and found equally responsible after the end of the story.
Let's start with the big one: ***.
In a play through done by BK Stunt on GameFAQs, he killed around 800 people.
If the protagonists were all incarcerated that would total 17 million dollars a kill,
meaning it would be 13 billion dollars in ***.
That's a lot of ***.
Again we're assuming each case would be tried separately, not like The Dark Knight.
I don't know my law very well but that was pretty ridiculous.
According to that same study, armed robbery costs around 335 thousand dollars per case.
And there were 39 cases of armed robbery in the play through, totalling at 13 million
dollars in stealing people's stuff at gunpoint.
Woah.
Aggravated assault costs around 145 thousand dollars per case
and there's 30 cases of aggravated assault
that's 4.3 million dollars of beatin' people up.
For car destruction, blowing up a car wouldn't be too different from totalling it, and according
to Forbes
the average cost of replacing a totalled car is 30 thousand dollars.
In the play through, there were 70 totalled cars
costing around 2.1 million dollars or the price of one really nice car.
The average cost of replacing a streetlight is 4 thousand dollars and the average cost
of replacing a street sign is 300 dollar.
Totalling out at the grand, massive total of
215 thousand dollars, cuz they only ran over like 50 of each.
This isn't even mentioning the cost of all the heists you pull in the game, which totals
in just under 207 million dollars stolen.
You could invest heavily in the stock market that you will alter by assassinating different
high-level targets.
If you complete these missions at the end of the story, you can make around 1.8 billion
dollars through stock fraud and insider trading.
In one of these missions you assassinate the CEO of a Facebook or Apple -like company that
was about to unveil their latest phone.
When Apple first announced the iPhone, their stock jumped 20 points and within the year
had doubled.
In the game, Life Invader stock starts around $200 a share and plummets to $3 a share after
the assassination.
Which if compared to the number of stocks Apple had at the time of the iPhone announcement,
would lose Life Invader investors 170 billion dollars.
That drop actually might be a bit unrealistic because when Steve Jobs died, Apple shares
only dropped 12% or $60 a share.
Then again he didn't get his head blown off by the device he had been working on for years.
That brings us to a grand total of....
Bing!
185 billion
27 million
493 thousand
771 dollars.
That's right, 185 billion dollars.
And that's only scratching the surface, that's not counting stray bullet damage,
insurance claims,
paying dudes to clean up blood off the streets.
And if you look at it 172 of that 185 billion dollars is stock fraud.
It's a bit of a chilling realization that the lives of 800 people are valued less than
stock holders investments in *** iPhones.
Does this storyline of GTA V cost more than the third act of Man of Steel?
Well, 9-11 was estimated to have cost the world around 3 trillion dollars so...
no.
But it did probably cost more than the battle in Smallville in the second act.
What do you think about the cost of GTA V?
Is it high, is it too low, is it as high as the disappointment that Man of Steel left
us with?
Shoot it out in the comments and I'll talk about my favourite comments in the next Friday
comments video.
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And by shoot I mean click the subscribe button.
And as always, thanks for watching.