The Sim Exchange - How IT Works

How It Works

The prediction market works as a stock market game for players to predict the number of units a game or console hardware will sell or the reviews a game will receive. These predictions are made by trading global lifetime sales stocks, NPD Futures, and Metacritic Futures. These tradable contracts directly forecast the metric, for example: If a stock is priced at 100DKP, this corresponds to a forecast of 1 million units. If a trader believes the product will sell more than 1 million units, then he would buy the stock, if he believes the product will sell less than 1 million units, then he would sell the stock. In this way, the simExchange is a type of stock market game.

The website also features a number of user tools to aggregate and display information about video games and publishers. In addition to a message board for each game, the simExchange advertises the ability of users to submit relevant news articles, and to append images and videos of a game to its page. Users may also vote on the importance of such submitted content by spending 100DKP to place either an "up bid" or a "down bid" on the content, receiving a 100DKP payout every time another user votes in the same way. Down bids were removed from the system in August 2009 as a result of user feedback. In this way, the simExchange is also a social news website. In March 2010, a number of these content submission tools, such as the ability to submit images and video, were removed due to lack of use, although the features remain advertised in the site's tutorials.