@drl21, I'm a mathematics major so that stuff unfortunately leaks out every now and then.
I think that's pretty much the main concern as well. Take Diablo II for instance, it's seemed to tail off and continue at what would presumably be a fairly slow by steady rate, but when Diablo III was announced it rocketed back into the top sellers list. The Sims also had a very jumpy sales distribution, which roughly correlated with each of it's billion expansion packs. These kinds of things are hard to predict unless you have insider information of what will be released in the future. I also think that the introduction of old classic titles on Steam and the just announced Good Old Games will have a significant impact on older titles.
When the reward for predicting GLS roughly correlates with the actual GLS, delisting will work by virtue of reflecting reality, but in the cases where something changes the sales quite a bit later the payout doesn't really work in reinforcing the goal of the SimExchange. Hence I don't feel like delisting is fair because of situations like I described above.
Grinding out the numbers will be a pain in the ass, assuming I can get enough historical data, even with something like R, so I'll leave it to the SimExchange staff if they want to comment on their accuracy (that's also part of the reason I left it to you -- there was a remote chance you'd want to grind through all those numbers).
It seems like a hard problem to correct. In the real world markets operate on currency that has significant value -- it costs you something of great worth to make the wrong call about a company and companies can go under entirely. There is no such threat at all on the SimExchange, which makes it far easiest to artificially inflate GLS predictions.
Think back to Diablo 2 again, what do you think the SimExchange would have predicted for it's sales? Most games are done almost all their sales within a year, and the last sales numbers before now for Diablo 2 were about 4.5 million. I don't think the SimExchange would have produced good results.
If you look at The Sims 3 discussions here, people can't even agree on what the last known Sims 2 sales numbers were let alone predict what the current sales could be. One person claims 50 million, another person 6.3 million, someone claims another random number -- that seems insane and is, but if you look back at the sales figures from the first year or two there would have been complete consensus on GLS.
Even the relatively stable Assassin's Creed predictions will probably quite a bit off in the end given the current prediction has settled near the last known figures, and the eventual release of Assassin's Creed 2. Maybe it will change, maybe not -- the point being there's quite a few titles that the SimExchange seems ill equipped to predict.
5
I'm a mathematics major so that stuff unfortunately leaks out every now and then.
I think that's pretty much the main concern as well. Take Diablo II for instance, it's seemed to tail off and continue at what would presumably be a fairly slow by steady rate, but when Diablo III was announced it rocketed back into the top sellers list. The Sims also had a very jumpy sales distribution, which roughly correlated with each of it's billion expansion packs. These kinds of things are hard to predict unless you have insider information of what will be released in the future. I also think that the introduction of old classic titles on Steam and the just announced Good Old Games will have a significant impact on older titles.
When the reward for predicting GLS roughly correlates with the actual GLS, delisting will work by virtue of reflecting reality, but in the cases where something changes the sales quite a bit later the payout doesn't really work in reinforcing the goal of the SimExchange. Hence I don't feel like delisting is fair because of situations like I described above.
Grinding out the numbers will be a pain in the ass, assuming I can get enough historical data, even with something like R, so I'll leave it to the SimExchange staff if they want to comment on their accuracy (that's also part of the reason I left it to you -- there was a remote chance you'd want to grind through all those numbers).
It seems like a hard problem to correct. In the real world markets operate on currency that has significant value -- it costs you something of great worth to make the wrong call about a company and companies can go under entirely. There is no such threat at all on the SimExchange, which makes it far easiest to artificially inflate GLS predictions.
Think back to Diablo 2 again, what do you think the SimExchange would have predicted for it's sales? Most games are done almost all their sales within a year, and the last sales numbers before now for Diablo 2 were about 4.5 million. I don't think the SimExchange would have produced good results.
If you look at The Sims 3 discussions here, people can't even agree on what the last known Sims 2 sales numbers were let alone predict what the current sales could be. One person claims 50 million, another person 6.3 million, someone claims another random number -- that seems insane and is, but if you look back at the sales figures from the first year or two there would have been complete consensus on GLS.
Even the relatively stable Assassin's Creed predictions will probably quite a bit off in the end given the current prediction has settled near the last known figures, and the eventual release of Assassin's Creed 2. Maybe it will change, maybe not -- the point being there's quite a few titles that the SimExchange seems ill equipped to predict.