One of the biggest problems people face in society is housing. Everyone wants one but there’s only a limited amount of space, so house prices are through the roof. But are things the same in videogames? What would that manor in Los Santos or Whiterun run you in real-life? A new study by actual real estate agents can tell us.
The analysis, by London agency L&C Mortgages, takes into account game population counts, location, and local currency values to work out house prices in games such as Skyrim, GTA5, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, The Witcher, and Stardew Valley. You can check out the full study here.
For example, the team worked out that a fully-furnished Proudspire Manor in Skyrim’s Solitude costs around 36,200 Septims. Of course the trouble then is in converting the game’s currency to real-world values. They did this by comparing the prices of food items in both worlds – carrots, spiced wine etc – and then taking into account where that food came from. “Nothing is mass produced in this Nord wilderness,” the study points out, “so we made the assumption that the value of this organically grown and pastorally-farmed food would be more akin to the organic produce you can buy in UK supermarkets.”
With that theory in place, they estimate that Proudspire Manor would cost around $62,380/£46,208 – a lot more after furnishing. By comparison, according to Rightmove, last year the average price of a flat in London was around £560,042.
Admittedly a flat in London would be a bit more sophisticated than Solitude (well, a little bit anyway), and London obviously has a larger population. So a closer comparison would probably be Willow Creek in The Sims 4. The base plot of a property in the game’s most expensive neighbourhood, Oakenstead, runs about 261,153 simoleans.
A simolean is considered roughly a dollar, but once again comparing it to items that can be bought in real-life, such as smoke alarms, the team roughly estimated that 1 simoleon = 91 cents. With that in mind, the most expensive house plot in The Sims 4 comes to around $245,868/£182,124. “Be careful that you don’t pick a cursed plot though,” the study wisely points out.