Make it a year then...whatever. But the Market Maker, I'd think, has to have some mechanism for human intervention in situations like this.
SE hasn't had to deal with it but project 2,3 years down the road and there will be all these dead stocks laying around that don't REALLY have a final price.
This is goint to happen alot with PSP games for instance (which I spend ample funds shorting and gaining I may add :) ) as SE is attracting traders that are sticking to the big names rather than seeking true values for each stock and reporting on PSP games disappears fairly quickly as most of the games are low volume (relatively).
@kspraydad, That could be possible, but then something like the Red Steel incident could happen again. A surprise twist in stock prices that could no longer be evaluated if closed out. The idea is sufficient in its basis in 'wisdom of the crowd', but your idea does work well for your desired stock (no trading for 6 months) trading.
The system you have proposed could be tweaked, maybe the top 250 would be more appropriate. I don't know.
So there is a disincentive to try and find old/forgotten games if you don't already have a source of sales figures in your pocket...otherwise you are at the mercy of someone, sometime finding a figure.
In a real market place would the market maker (ie the brokerage house) not have some ability to dictate a fair price rather than just offering the last price traded at (which is approx what the market maker is doing?) The market maker would bring together its 'experts' to determine a fair price.
Perhaps we could have a shareholder vote (say limited to the top 500 players) to determine a cashout value with a limitation that the max payout would be no more than X% away from the DKP at the time the vote was called for? This would be for any stock that has had no trading for say 6mos or so.
@kspraydad, The idea of the stocks has always been they will eventually stagnate and the market maker will provide liquidity for you to cash out by selling your long position or buying back your short position. There's no way to cash it out because we don't know the true world value--that is why the stocks are interesting in that they are supposed to provide a better approximation than we have otherwise.
This does lead to some complications, which is why I think there has been a push for more contracts that expire, such as the individual game futures that have been brought back. So far, closing out my stock positions has work for me.
Last we heard from this game it was at 27,000 units in Dec 2006....
At what point does SE drop a listing and how do we determine its cash out value? Lack of trading and thus the price being stable does not seem like a fair cash out price if the price is stable do to lack of interest in the title and difficulty getting numbers for it.
OK VGcharts, finally has some data on Eragon. And as we confirmed, this game won't hit 200k copies across all platforms. No Xbox or PS2 numbers available, but Eragon sold in November:
11,500 copies on DS 4,750 copies on PSP 11,250 copies on Xbox 360
In December it sold another 20,000 copies on DS (about 2x November numbers).
We can assume PS2 and Xbox sales were equally dismal. This stock is probably worth about 5-10 DKP on each platform.
I agree with the calls on overoptimism, I think many stocks are setting up for a correction. A flood of new users pushed the market up the first time it was linked on Joystiq and was then followed by a wave of selling. I think a similar thing will happen soon.
Interesting, only 30 games on Xbox sold over 500,000 copies. Only 17 games on Xbox sold over 1 million copies. Only 2 games sold over 2 million copies (both of them named Halo). This is getting me in the shorting mood =P.
I've been saying this for a while now...OVEROPTIMISM. People here are throwing around predictions like, "this game will sell 3.5 million copies EASY!"
Now I think many people just have no idea how hard it is to sell a video game and how few copies are actually sold. "How can [Eragon] not [sell 200,000 copies]?" EASY! Most games NEVER sell anywhere near that many copies. Many games sell 50,000 copies and are done.
That is why it's funny seeing people claiming, oh Assassin's Creed, Crackdown, X new IP will sell 3.5 million copies EASY. That's like saying every random new movie will gross $350 million in box office revenues when only a handful of movies have done that in human history.
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Make it a year then...whatever. But the Market Maker, I'd think, has to have some mechanism for human intervention in situations like this.
SE hasn't had to deal with it but project 2,3 years down the road and there will be all these dead stocks laying around that don't REALLY have a final price.
This is goint to happen alot with PSP games for instance (which I spend ample funds shorting and gaining I may add :) ) as SE is attracting traders that are sticking to the big names rather than seeking true values for each stock and reporting on PSP games disappears fairly quickly as most of the games are low volume (relatively).