this video is brought to you by War Thunder in a previous video we discussed whether GTA 5 or Cyberpunk 2077 were safer places to live and the conclusion we came to was that under no circumstances for any sane reason should you go anywhere near Night City it is the most dangerous city in fiction featuring gangs equipped with weapons capable of raising an entire nation a state of living so poor that the trash and waste piles above the buildings you could be living in you'll be constantly wondering if tomorrow is the day you'll finally bite the bullet there is absolutely no reason why you should visit Night City let alone live there but what if we ignored all that and moved there what would it be like working and living in the region how much would it actually cost to live in Night City today we're going to figure that out but before we dive into the main question we first have to answer a few smaller questions to make sure we are on the same page number one what do we need to live in the city and number two what is the value of the local currency for question one we have to decide what is considered a necessary cost to survive in Night City the pillars so to speak of living here we can immediately put down the basic needs of every human on Earth food water shelter all are necessary to not die the basics aren't the only things we're going to have to account for though the cost of transportation if you have to commute for work regular medical care taxes or lifestyle needs as well have to be considered but the numbers here can fluctuate a lot depending on your current circumstances if you're living with a partner for instance or have a child ignore the fact that you'd have to be a madman to move here with a child and instead put together a template to start from this V is going to be our template to work off from his name is Vic vic is an adult man in good health mostly he has some skills in the technical field that could offer him decent work and his lifestyle stays relatively simple with no partner or child to speak of hallucinations of rocker boys do not count for this analysis knowing who we're working with helps but none of that really matters if we don't have money and before we can make money we have to ask what is a euro dollar the ED or European currency unit is the primary currency used in Europe and North America whatever part of Night City you're in right now it's safe to assume you need Euro dollars to live are you even from this game is it that weird for us to be here when you already have a dead man in your head stick some iron in your mouth and pull the trigger fair point euro dollars or Eddies are going to be the money we use here in Night City but how much is an Eddie worth to figure this out we're going to try and make a conversion rate between Eddies and the current USD oh why is Sha Bean on the screen instead of a Euro dollar symbol well one time I accidentally misspoke when trying to say Edd's and said Nedies instead which made me think of Game of Thrones as Ned Stark and I had a party chuckle thinking about Shawn Bean on a dollar bill so anytime you talk about Eddies I'm just going to put a picture of Shawn Bean up to represent them we already know Ned's head is pretty portable anyways to figure out the conversion rate I tried to compare the prices of common goods you'd find both in modern day and in Night City that way we get an estimated conversion rate off of those prices my first thought was to try the vending machines near the apartments you start the game at vending machines are generally pretty cheap no matter where you go in the world and can be a nice baseline to work off from i checked out this corner of vending machines and found this one offering prepackaged pies for five eddies based on some quick Google searches in my own memory a pie like this would probably cost around $2 to $3 from your average vending machine we'll make it 250 for our topic here that makes the amount of currency necessary to buy a pie in Night City to be twice the amount you need in the current day a ratio of $2 to one Eddie that seems good but it's important to check other prices first before we finalize that value we can check the other vending machine prices too drinks are a pretty common thing to buy and in the US you can expect a price of $1 to $150 for your average soft drink whereas a regular can of soda in Night City is holy [ __ ] nine edies that's six times the price of a can of soda now I'm not an economist or good at math we're smart but I think even smart people would be just as confused as I am looking at the prices of the items in the game and there's a few reasons why a few issues arise trying to compare real money to cyberpunk money the first is inflation the value of money had to change between today and 50 years from now so our modern-day dollar is already worth a lot less in the city but on top of that Cyberpunk exists in an alternate universe that is best described as post-apocalyptic and that makes money conversations even more complicated now we're about to talk about a lot of money here and it may be quite a lot to take in so before we start crunching the big numbers let's talk about something we can do for free namely our sponsor for today's video War Thunder the largest most comprehensive vehicle combat game in the world featuring 2500 different vehicles to take control of from air to land to sea you'll be able to ride in the weapons of war from 10 major nations across history everything from the sounds the graphics and the details on the vehicles immerses you in the action you don't have a health bar but a full crew engines fuel tanks and weapons that can be blown through at any moment but with the right armor and the right plans can always be overcome the attention to detail is unlike any other even across the historical battlefields you'll be fighting on whether it's the modern-day Middle East the Majinino line or deep in the African Canyons 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luxury in this city comparing this to modern-day water is just not feasible and that goes for more than just what they drink the worst problem however with comparing the prices isn't the inflation or even the apocalypse it's video game mechanics this is the Rayfield Arendite S9 the most expensive car in Cyberpunk 2077 a hypercar of the highest luxury labeled by the game as being worth more than the GDP of many island nations okay so just from that we're talking about in the numbers of over a billion dollars to beat the likes of the Cayman Islands Greenland yes Greenland is an island Solomon Islands and smaller nations that's a pretty insane price but we actually get a significant discount in the game thanks to Wakacoako who acquired the car through an Argentinian ambassador trying to dump all of his assets before fleeing the country that means we can buy the car at the highly discounted price of 150,000 eddies that's literally nothing even if we convert at the rate this lady's butt presented us that only reaches $10 million a far cry from the billion that the Rayfield is estimated to be worth in other words this is like selling a PS5 during the height of CO for 20 bucks in a pack of gum obviously the ray field only costs that much due to game mechanics not any actual lore reason an issue that is going to come up a lot in this video i've spent more than a page and a half of my script trying to find the worth of an Eddie and have come up with zero concrete answers though at this point I did what any idiot would do in this scenario and checked if Reddit had the answer instead and they did reddit user Wiggly Otter great name by the way made a thread that went through most of the stuff we talked about here and even a few we didn't mention they also couldn't find the answer for the rayfield so we're just going to ignore that GDP bit and find a relative value of 3.2 USD for one Eddie we're going to round that down to three just for easier math make sure to thank your local otter for their hard work let's say that Vic makes a pretty average salary statistically right in the median for the US that would be about 66,000 USD divide that by three and we learn that Vic earns roughly 22,000 eddies per year so now that we know all of that what can Vic with these circumstances afford in Night City we're going to start with a place to live in i feel like any adult under 30 already knows what it's like to live in a world where 90% of the houses are bought up by corporations and rented out at exorbitant prices so you will feel right at home in the Night City housing market maybe we can still get a good rent price though i'm going to be very generous to Night City here and assume the rent prices we find include the utilities for the property water electric gas etc it's a big assumption to make but we don't get clear numbers on what those utility bills would be so we're just going to put it together i'd like to see our fella get a nice property maybe in the Glenn we have this property available here with a lovely open apartment huge windows massive TV a small kitchenet and a spacious bathroom this would be a very nice place to live and you'd only need 80,000 netties it isn't even the most expensive property you can rent here the apartment at the center of Corpo Plaza dwarfs the Glenn apartment with 110,000 eddies oh by the way that price is per month we only pay this price once in the game but that's because Cyberpunk 2077's V goes on a cyber psycho tear throughout the city in the span of a couple weeks or Vic however plans to live a long and fulfilling life and at the moment he can't even afford a fourth of that monthly price we're going to have to find something cheaper this Japan Town apartment is pretty it's in a more dangerous part of the city sure but hardly the worst area it's got a decent view kitchenet comfortable vibes i think this could be a great place to live oh god damn it 30k fine fine uh there's got to be a cheap property around here somewhere the last apartment available is on the north side in this little apartment building it definitely is not a safe area as shown by the one gig you do here but we will take what we can get you have a bed a bathroom no kitchen an armory because every house in Night City needs an armory all for the low low price of 10,000 edies vic can afford to be at this property for 2 months that's assuming he gets his yearly salary together in that time too i'm willing to make some concessions and say that these areas have cheaper properties without giant armories in them but even with a discount most of these are far outside the range we could afford that leaves us with one option to look at the mega buildings these places are practically an entire slum crammed together into a giant box place where the poorest are dumped to live in and because of that we can find probably the cheapest real price for a property in the city we don't actually have a price for the apartment V lives in at the start of the game but it's clear from the intro that this was the first property V could afford after moving out of Mama Wells's house and given that they don't have 20K on hand to pay off the tab with Victor it's a safe bet to say these apartments are cheaper than the ones we've seen so far i'm going to throw a hailmary price of 4,000 Eddies per month for one apartment in the mega building which I know is probably not correct but I'm trying here man that means to stay in this property inside the mega buildings you need an average salary of 48,000 eddies so we're going to have to do some serious rethinking none of the properties available in the game are anywhere near the salary we have here your first thought in this moment is probably telling me to stop using the USD comparison and instead find the average salary of a night city citizen and that's a fair point but you'll quickly realize that the USD option is the far more favorable one in the book No Coincidence a heist story set in the world of 2077 we learn that the job of a welder can earn 30 eddies per day working that's about 3.75 eddies per hour if they worked 8 hours that day which they probably worked more assuming they work say 6 days a week they make about 720 edies per month or a little over 8,500 eddies per year the in-game prices just aren't feasible even for the lowest rung of the city i know the homeless situation in Night City is bad but this would make nearly everything in the city impossible to live in corporations are greedy but they still need a barn to put their cows in to milk them dry i think we have another Rayfield scenario here gameplay crashing with realistic pricing and to make this discussion even feasible we got to change it there's nothing that inherently places the rent price of these apartments at per month so instead we're going to interpret these prices as the yearly cost of staying at these properties this makes the Glenn apartment far more realistic at about 6,700 eddies per month and the high-end properties like Corpo Plaza around 9,200 this connects well with the CorpoV life path in the game too as you're considered incredibly wealthy for having a little over 100k sitting in your bank account in the opening still far beyond the price range of RVIC here but this makes the low-end properties of North Side in the mega building far more feasible we're going to change the mega building apartment to be at 10K as well meaning both of these properties charge 820 Eddy's per month to live in or account for half of Vick's annual income in case you're wondering that would place these apartments at about 2500 USD per month and with that we can finally move on to Oh damn it i forgot about taxes yeah even in a city managed by mega corporations you still got to pay government taxes so now that we have a place to rent we need to quickly find out the taxes our Vic has to pay since taxes aren't exactly detailed in the game we're going to use the current US tax rate for an individual making 66,000 USD per year which is roughly 23.5% i'm going to round that up to 25% because I like round numbers that means that regular Vic with his 22,000 Eddie salary pays 5,500 Eddy's in taxes as well as an additional 10,000 for his apartment rent leaving Vic with a leftover amount of 6500 Eddies to cover everything else he needs to live for a year in Night City or roughly 20,000 USD now that sounds like a lot but let's hold on to our Shawn Beans for a minute here and think about what that means we have water included in our rent but we're not going to consider the tap water safe to drink here and we have to eat food to sustain ourselves actually I don't i'm a PNG but you would have to if you lived here for our yearly grocery expenses I decided to use the California average as our base after very thorough research I learned that the average single person in California spends roughly $100 on groceries per week 400 per month 4,800 per year after converting to Eddy's we get a cost of 1,600 Eddies per year on groceries man I got a pretty good haul from the grocery store i can't wait to use all these ingredients in a home-cooked meal oh nuts okay we have to change the cost a little bit because obviously we're not in modern-day California and specifically we don't have a kitchen night City's lowincome housing is actually pretty clever in that regard the apartments in the mega buildings don't have kitchens and getting individual appliances to work with instead would not only be more of a hassle but also difficult to manage given the apartment layout but every apartment has a vending machine installed that you can buy whatever you need from food water women men guns you really have the whole variety everything about the design is meant to encourage you to eat out to consume from the vending machines takeout and restaurants instead of cooking yourself that makes the average price you are going to spend on meals each day skyrocket as we've already seen from the nine Eddie vending machine soda which is also the cheapest drink option energy drinks are 17 Eddy's it also means that you can't save as much money on leftovers because this place isn't even equipped with a fridge that's more money per meal with less value coming out of each meal prepared we are going to do our best here to save as much money as possible but it isn't looking pretty vic is going to avoid vending machine food as much as he can mainly buying from local stalls and restaurants which offer cheaper prices vic's diet is going to consist of lots of matapong decaf fake beef and hot dogs this is a good moment to point out that there is practically no real meat in the entire city almost all animal life in the region is wiped out and all of the meat we eat here is synthetic instead so they have to do stuff like locust pizza to replace your usual toppings oh and all aven life in Night City actually went extinct thanks to the Aven Extermination Act of 2063 which ruled all birds within an 18mi radius of Night City to be killed on site that was thanks to a disease spreading at the time through them i guess we're not getting chicken either hey is there a laser dot on my head i don't have an exact statistic I can work with but to account for all of this I'm going to say that this results in a 50% increase in total expenses for food and even that's being pretty generous to Night City that leaves us with a total of 2400 eddies per year on food and groceries and now we have 4,100 eddies left or 12,300 USD with all of our needed to not die needs met this amount is enough to live somewhat comfortably on uh but we're not done yet vic needs to keep working if he's going to be making rent so that means he's got to commute to work each day now we got to calculate how much his commute cost him in an average year now we could go the car route but something says that purchasing a car in a mega corporatized world wouldn't be a great idea car manufacturers today are already jamming as many subscriptions as possible in cars i don't even want to imagine how many there would be in cyberpunk beats time to go home your free trial on acceleration has expired what to accelerate please confirm your subscription to a premium driving plan including acceleration braking 12-hour battery capacity opening windows air conditioning and glove box radio GPS and speedometer not included maybe a cheap less software dependent vehicle wouldn't be too bad for Vic but I think for our purposes we're going to have him commute on public transport namely the Encart line i talked about the mag lev rail system night city has in my last video but I didn't actually give it that much credit the rail line in the city is actually really good it has consistent trains arriving at each station every 5 minutes as shown by the monitors on the screen and getting on and off of them is as simple as using your end cart pass we're going to make a scenario where Vic has to travel from his apartment in mega building H10 to the Shaitto Imports building where he works in the Glenn he can do this by entering the end cart terminal right next to the mega building and getting on the yellow line towards Pacifica vic then gets off the yellow line at Alexander Street and changes to the red line towards mega building H7 we then get off at Congress and MLK and take a short walk to Shaitto Imports that's two metro fares to get on the two lines spending a total of about 10 to 15 minutes on the commute we'll use the LA Metro Fair here as a reference which is roughly $2 this is a bit biased but I have a hard time believing that the Encart fair would be anything less than an Eddie i mean just listen to this how can you make a passenger buy two tickets just cuz she weighs more talk to them we're not passengers they're Eddie signs we'll say instead of a 3:1 difference it's a 1 one this time so two eddies per fair that's eight eddies per day on Vick's work commute let's say five times a week coming to a total of 40 eddies per week on Metro Fairs 160 eddies per month and 1,920 a year we'll round that down after accounting for the commute we are left with 2,200 eddies okay things are starting to get a little dicey but I think we have everything we need now to live in the city we have food shelter a safe commute and our tribute to the corporate overlords there's definitely nothing else we need in Night City like say a gun we have all of these things now but where in Night City a cyber psycho could be around any corner about to rip you to shreds there's gang members robbing innocent folk just down the hallway we're going to be killed just by walking to work one day and if we want to avoid that we're going to need some protection thankfully we only need to buy one weapon to keep on hand because we're very unlikely to survive long enough to get a second one we'll just head down to Second Amendment and get ourselves a handgun okay well maybe it isn't even worth it let's try it inside the range you hear me huh okay it works but there is absolutely zero chance we can afford that we do need something though maybe a cheaper option like a 3D printed single-use firearm it's a good thing we have budget arm vending machines just for that i don't know though maybe we should test them first i'm just testing it it's just a test that'll be another 100 eddies but we can now protect ourselves but how much are we actually going to protect ourselves with just a gun even equipped with our unpainted Warhammer figurine we're unlikely to win against a thug equipped in full cyberware we probably should have some insurance in place to protect us emergency care in Night City is privatized and in the event of an emergency you need to be subscribed to their insurance plans to be helped most importantly we want a trauma team plan to save us in the event of a medical emergency there are three trauma team packages: silver gold and platinum platinum offers a variety of services but given that our Eddie wallet is already looking a little ghostly we can assume that platinum is out of the question the silver plan does mean we need to pay for every minute of transport every bullet shot by trauma team specialist all fuel spent in the course of a rescue and any equipment damage sustained during but that's just a small price to pay for the future what do we have to pay right now in the 2045 version of Night City depicted in Cyberpunk Red the silver plan was placed at 500 eddies per month i am once again going to be generous here and say they have not changed that price for 32 years and that it is still 500 Eddies per month that comes to a total cost per year of 6,000 edies oh we're in the red okay we're we're in the red you know what it's fine we can go with the cheaper option there's other medical services as shown in Cyberpunk Edgeunners they're not as good but they maybe will save your life or sell you off the scavves either or we can just bring that back up to 2100 we don't need that safety plan uh but we may need an anti-malware service instead see a majority of the people in Night City have cyberware and most workplaces actually require certain cyberware to work with them so if you want to keep your job in the city you better have that cyberware needed to keep up with it which requires maintenance proper care and protection against netrunner should anyone try to hack into them i don't have an exact number for how much that would all cost but given that the basic hand cyberware can be a couple grand alone I'm expecting the price of it put together isn't too far off from that trauma team silver plan and we're back at the negatives actually never mind we don't need cyberware that still leaves 2,000 for us we can work with this vic can either live without these specific protections in place most likely dying in a couple weeks or maybe we can find something else i didn't mention them earlier but there are some areas where you can technically have zero rent in the city both Pacifica and Dogtown are considered abandoned parts of the city and the run-down apartments left behind in these areas are perfectly livable if you're up for a true post-apocalyptic lifestyle that gives us back 10,000 eddies to work with meaning we can afford the silver plan see this can work we just need to be able to commute to Okay I see the issue with this pacifica is completely gangridden so being able to travel through it safely is going to require costly protection not to mention Dog Town is completely gated we're just going to say that the taxes before are going towards paying off the gangs instead oh and no public transport out here so we're going to need a car which is going to cost us at least 16 grand for a Mir Supron FS3 the premier driving experience and we also have to account for battery charging costs which we can't do at our house since this abandoned building doesn't have power so we got to run our own generator and source our own polluted water to use and find our own food and we probably still have to pay taxes if we work in the city and we probably have an even higher chance of being killed here than inside the city and maybe this is why everyone turns to crime in Night City look I think we need to bring this back to the bigger picture what is the cost of living in Night City we figured out enough here to definitively say that you would need to make at least 20,000 eddies per year to live in NC or 60,000 USD if you were able to make that much working here you'd be able to have a home food and the tiniest bit of security but you wouldn't be anywhere near safe with zero protections in place all it would take is being in the wrong place once to end it all a driveby a cyber psycho an angry corpo an angry cop automated weaponry really anything could cause your life to end and become one extra stat on the daily death lottery that's just how life would always be here in the city of dreams and this is the favorable outcome we had to make a lot of generous assumptions here to even arrive at this number most wouldn't be as lucky as Vic to even have all of those eddies they have to cut corners starve a few days rob someone in the nights or take bigger risks to make it by it makes me wonder why even bother i think what made this question so fascinating to me is that despite the overwhelming cost looming over everything you need to live here people are still living there's still communities small businesses events and gatherings life in a place so destructive in a way it makes you want to find out what these random faces in the crowd can find here how they can simply be sure they're struggling but here they are all the same and if you want to be one of those people finding happiness no matter how bittersweet in the crowds of Night City I can't say I understand you but I wish you luck on your trip i've prepared you as best I can you know the costs of living in Night City now you just have to live in it as you step forward the air around you parts into a grand pathway towards a place beyond your view a chill runs down your spine you just stepped into the 18-mi perimeter of the Night City limits a laser site has clicked onto your location the Aven Extermination Act of 2063 oh [ __ ] you should duck [Music] let's go thank you again to War Thunder for supporting the channel you can check out War Thunder from my sign up link below and receive the exclusive bonus pack and join in on the fun war Thunder is available on PC Xbox PlayStation and mobile let me know what fun map details you find in the game while you're there [Music] hey hey hey [Music]