Right now, people can make tons of money on old, stagnant stocks just by watching tSE, VGChartz or news outlets. They'll see what a game has already sold, and take a position based on that. This devalues prediction ability, and values time spent watching tSE, VGC and news outlets.
If stocks become delisted, these people won't make as much money "day trading", but a much larger problem will be created. People will start avoiding stocks they fear will be delisted. I shouldn't have to explain how this taints the whole game and the effectiveness of the market's prediction abilities.
Consider this idea, however. When stocks become stagnant, don't delist them, but simply stop introducing new shares of the stock. Stop all trading with the automated market maker. The one possible exception to this (which I haven't thought through), would be letting people clear out their existing positions at market price.
When news comes out about the stock, it will either jump up thanks to the day traders snapping up outstanding orders (giving the long term traders their sales prediction exactly), at which point the market maker could automatically turn back on. If there is no one there to trade the stock, the price can be manually adjusted as was done with Red Steel, and the market maker manually turned back on.
This also allows you to reduce clutter by sorting stocks into the two groups.
More importantly for the future, the games which IPO should be chosen more carefully. Right now we basically rate games on our interest in them. Instead, we should rate them based either on the level of sales we expect, or the level of sales we would consider "successful," up to a certain limit (4 million or so). These ratings could also be used to determine IPO price, meaning people would not simply overrate their favorites, as it would lead to an overvalued IPO and the stock crashing. If we almost exclusively listed million selling games, we could rely on VGChartz highly reliable (other than PC games) million-shippers list, instead of their weaker weekly numbers.
Steps should further be taken to ensure most games IPO in the same time frame before their release date--I'd say 6-8 weeks.
I know this turned into general comments on how to improve tSE, but I think everything here is relevant.
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If stocks become delisted, these people won't make as much money "day trading", but a much larger problem will be created. People will start avoiding stocks they fear will be delisted. I shouldn't have to explain how this taints the whole game and the effectiveness of the market's prediction abilities.
Consider this idea, however. When stocks become stagnant, don't delist them, but simply stop introducing new shares of the stock. Stop all trading with the automated market maker. The one possible exception to this (which I haven't thought through), would be letting people clear out their existing positions at market price.
When news comes out about the stock, it will either jump up thanks to the day traders snapping up outstanding orders (giving the long term traders their sales prediction exactly), at which point the market maker could automatically turn back on. If there is no one there to trade the stock, the price can be manually adjusted as was done with Red Steel, and the market maker manually turned back on.
This also allows you to reduce clutter by sorting stocks into the two groups.
More importantly for the future, the games which IPO should be chosen more carefully. Right now we basically rate games on our interest in them. Instead, we should rate them based either on the level of sales we expect, or the level of sales we would consider "successful," up to a certain limit (4 million or so). These ratings could also be used to determine IPO price, meaning people would not simply overrate their favorites, as it would lead to an overvalued IPO and the stock crashing. If we almost exclusively listed million selling games, we could rely on VGChartz highly reliable (other than PC games) million-shippers list, instead of their weaker weekly numbers.
Steps should further be taken to ensure most games IPO in the same time frame before their release date--I'd say 6-8 weeks.
I know this turned into general comments on how to improve tSE, but I think everything here is relevant.