diablo 3 serves to highlight everything that is wrong with the assumption that the participants in prediction markets are rational. i think the term that applies here in particular is "irrational exuberance" :) combine that with the name "blizzard" and its a recipe for seriously overvalued numbers.
as far as the sames numbers go, i cant for the life of me find where i saw that estimate... but ive seen those numbers thrown around more than a few times over the last year...
the idea that diablo 3 will have lifetime sales approaching or exceeding 15 million is utterly ludicrous.
does anyone else think that the current projections for d3 are nothing short of absolute lunacy? d2 has been out for 8 years and its lifetime sales are somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-11 million from what i can find... *eight years*... does anyone honestly expect d3 to do 14+ million in the 8 years after its release?
@zukaus, I don't know where you got impression that I have "hard feelings" toward you. Maybe from my stated wish for you to have "5 months retirement" ? The point of my post is not really about your retirement, it is about how I might never, ever catch up to you. Of course, I could get lucky, and find you making mistake after mistake after mistake, but I didn't like to win because someone made a mistake, I like to win because I made better investment decision :).
Anyway, I don't have any hard feelings, and I don't think I will have hard feelings in the future. I have only a few "hot button" that can made me upset, and losing money is not one of them (being called a fanboy (without base / proof) is one of them :). )
If your motivation is something other than profitability, you wouldn't be able to amass such high networth, and you wouldn't be able to stay #1 for long (investing badly is way worse than retiring, you can go down very quickly that way).
I think you forgot that we have different position on BotB Wii (you short, me long). Unfortunately, that game really did very badly, so I don't think I can get much money from you (If I can recover my current 1 Million loss, I would have been happy).
The only weakness I can detect on your visible portfolio is your significant long investment on Sadness. IF Sadness are doing as bad as BotB, you are going to lose some money (Every 10K price point drop will cause you around 6.5 Million DKP loss, so if the price drop from 44 to 14, you might lose 20 Million, which is only 7% of your total networth). But without knowing more info about Sadness, it is dangerous to short them too much. I have some short on them, just to keep track of the price :).
When and on what stock did you make your last mistake ? Are you willing to share them (details and reason and when you decide to get out / stop) ? I always find that learning from other's mistake can be very useful.
Oh yeah and one more thing more on topic about Diablo III, I know there was some discussion on disc based sales vs. digital distribution and how that would affect sales. It's likely that in time Diablo III will eventually see release in both formats. All of the last generation Blizzard titles including Diablo II, Warcraft III, and Starcraft are available by download directly from Blizzard.
Sorry for the delay. I've been busy. You are right, most of my positions won't show up in my profile because I have to acquire a relatively large amount of stock before it shows up. It's usually not easy to get 3 million+ DKP orders in anything without moving the price dramatically. It's even harder to get out of those positions when you realize you've made a mistake. =)
Although I would say it wouldn't take that long for someone else who was dedicated to the game to rise up if I retired. If I didn't make the money someone else would. There are a number of players that I think would move quickly to the top, including yourself.
I hope we have no hard feelings friend. I am not purposely out to make anyone's life difficult. Unfortunately that's part of the game, over time it's almost a sure thing that I will eventually find myself in some position against yours. I know at some point I've probably been in disagreement with most of the active players to one degree or another.
It's especially interesting to see how people react sometimes. It seems like some people take things very personally and get angry because they feel that I am out to get them or that I am irrationally bullying them by throwing my money around which is just not true. My motivation is profitability, and I try to always have a good reason for buying or selling even though I won't always express my opinion in the comments. However, you have always been very polite and articulate in your arguments and comments and I can respect that even though we won't always agree.
Well I think that predictions overshooting the actual sales would be very very unusual. A game isn't delisted usually until sales slow down significantly, and that slow down is taken into account by the market. The only way an overshoot would happen is if it seemed like sales would be steady for a while, the game was delisted, and then sales stopped abruptly for some random reason...like the company goes out of business and stops producing copies for sale in the first place or something random.
As far as the other scenario, like I said before, i think we could have a system where we could bid on the effect of certain events on the life time sales of a game. In other words, imagine a graph of the lifetime sales. There are basically two types of patterns. One where a game sells a bunch at first, and then sells less and less over time until sales stop. The other graph would be similar, except after sales slow down, there are little spikes every once in a while, when an expansion comes out, when a game develops a fallowing, etc. The problem is that at the beginning we cant predict when these spikes will occur or how many there will be. We do, however, usually get a good sense that a spike will be coming shortly before it arrives. My suggestion would be to find a way to bid on how large we believe/expect these spikes to be. I think it can be done. The only issue would be your first point, letting people know about it. However, i think that the trade page could have a section informing people what spikes are being bid on, similar to how it shows the highest increasing and decreasing stocks of the day.
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