@Joe80, the answer is no. What you are suggesting is magic.

Here's another way to think about it. Every transaction, there are two parties. Ok, so what you are suggesting sounds great for the guy who bought. But what about the guy who is short? That means his gains are half and his losses are double.

Think about who is paying the double gains for the winner and taking the half losses for the loser--its the guy on the other side of the trade. How can this not be equal for both sides?

@Powertrade, I mean "You can't just INVENT new rules" not INVEST.

@Powertrade,
How is it not possible? You just have a formula that takes the gain and multiplies it times 1.5 for gains and multiplies losses by .5

@GoblinMerchant,
I know that and since I made that post I have posted twice saying I realized that was a mistake... I also explained quite clearly why I would double the gain and halve losses:

"My suggestion of 50% up on gains [variable 1], 50% less on losses [variable 2] (for Metacritic Futures only) is based on the fact that users say MC Futures are not worth the gain [variable 1] and they're too risky [variable 2]."

It seems like people are selectively reading posts or people are out to get me for some reason lately because they've been ignoring things I've said, putting words in my mouth, and giving me grief for stuff that was already addressed.

@feelmyring, because the risk is a lot lower. Metacritic futures are lower volatility. Risk and return are alway related. Trading sales futures are not any better because your risk is going up with the return. As someone previously mentioned, the actual return on any investment is just based on how mispriced it is (how difficult it is to predict). In that case you are getting compensated for the difficulty--and it is not necessarily a better deal (likely not).

@feelmyring,

I agree here to feelmring. I don't trade much of the MC but they have two upsides nothing else has: You may not be able to gain a high% but you also not loose a lot of %, therefore you can put some cash in them (time trust) if you don't know where to put it. It is most likely that you don't loose much of it. The second thing is that this behavior is very good for newbie's. That way they can learn how to trade in a not risky environment. Let them how they are. If this two upsides are not enough for you then let your money work in normal futures or stocks for you. Or do everybody here has so much money left, that they are in desperate need of an investment? I could suggest some :o)

@feelmyring,
Abandoning MC futures as well as adding a new type of Future would be a "fix" to the site imo, but I guess we differ on opinions about what is a fix and whats not.

If people are so negative towards MC Futures because of the huge risk and the tiny payout then my suggestion is not ludicrous at all. It makes sense. If you bid 10,000 shares on a MC Future at a score of 80 and it gets an 85, you're risking 800,000 for a gain of 50,000, and that would be a very very good outcome for a MC Future. Gaining 100,000 from that 800,000 investment would make it more worthwhile to bid on MC Futures while not inflating the gains that much at all given the risk. Likewise instead of losing 50,000 you'd only lost 25,000. If this is so completely ludicrous to you then what if it was 25% extra on gains/25% less on losses?

Would you like to share some examples where people suggested a fix to something on the SE where the aim was for players to get money thrown to them? I don't recall anything of the sort except for the 1 time Kultofcows dealt with those 3 canceled games, and he was asking us for a fix that we thought should be made. Other than that there have tons of things people on the SE have suggested as fixes that had nothing to do with money at all, sometimes we see suggestions and them implemented many times during 1 week.

@Joe80,
What I suggested wasn't a "fix"; it was to abandon MC futures entirely. What I did suggest was a different kind of existing future (Total monthly software sales for the three major consoles).

It seems like every time someone suggests a "fix" to a flawed product, it's a way to throw money at the players. Double the payout and half the losses? That's ludicrous. What's the point of even having the future, then? Why not just suggest that the admins institute interest on available cash in addition to the time trust? Or, how about 1 million DKP for every month of membership? Even better, if your name starts with A-Y, you get a 10 million DKP bonus (sorry zakus)?

The only upside of having the MC future that I can see, is that it's an easy enough way to be introduced to the concept of futures trading. It doesn't involve a ton of risk, it has a short expiration cycle, and it doesn't require a lot of outside research.

@Joe80,
Why does everyone on this site seem so intent on "fixing" everything? I understand that a lot of work went into establishing MC futures as a trading product, and that things shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, but often times, trading products fail. The MC futures are a good idea on paper, but from what we've seen, not so great in practice. It seems to boil down to two things, as far as I can see:
1) For high profile, almost guaranteed high review games, the incentive to trade is mostly removed, and
2) For the low profile games, no one really seems to care, based on trading volume.

I'm also kind of puzzled why the MC futures were added at all, given the rigorous culling of stocks to reduce clutter (and yes, I've seen the blog post). The fact that users must post comments saying essentially "Do people know that X MC future has started trading as well?" would lead me to believe that the MC future hasn't been a winning product, in the same way regular futures have.

Personally, instead of the MC futures, I'd like to see PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii software sales futures. That's just me, though.

@Joe80,

Are you saying if you made the range 0-1000DKP where 10DKP=1%?
I think that would raise the amount of participation in Metacritic futures but might also deter people due to the high cost. Maybe the community can vote on it and a new system could be formed (or people can vote to keep the current one).

@feelmyring,
Games like Zelda aren't the best for MC Futures. You do make the case for MC Futures not being worth it compared to other Futures or Stocks. They're just small gains to be made. Maybe MC Futures should have another digit added so that we're not bidding on scores of 85, 91, 93 but on scores of 850, 910, 930 where the 0 is just there for trading incentive and the first 2 digits reflect the score.

@Joe80,
Lets say someone buys the Zelda MC Future for the current price (91.09 as I write this). The game gets a MC Score of 93 after two weeks. $1.91 sounds really nice. A BRAND NEW USER (with 1mil DKP) could buy 2744 shares, for a grand profit of $5241.04. Why would anyone in their right mind risk 250k for 5k? That's a stupid risk for anyone, regardless of level. There's only so much benefit to trading MC futures, and the benefit comes in for the elite players, like yourself. In the same scenario: you could buy 53720 shares for just under 5 million DKP, for a grand profit of $102,602.50.

The only way these futures are worth any REAL money is if you can buy them for a stupidly low price and they score really high (or vice versa for selling).

@Alpha,
Sorry, I should have said about "the lack of immediate profit from making a fantastically wide market and having suckers hit your bids and lift your offers." There's a cap on how much money can be made on Metacritic futures. For a Zelda game, no one's going to be selling anything less than 90.

I try not to imply anything. The Metacritic futures are less profitable in the short term because people can't make $45 wide markets and reasonably expect to get fills on both sides. If there's only a few dollars to be made a few thousand times (DKP entry limits), why would anyone trade these? Personally, I think Metacritic futures are a waste of time.

@feelmyring, if you are implying that the Metacritic futures are less profitable, that would be incorrect. The only reason a contract can be less profitable is if it is more accurate...and I don't know if we are predicting Metascores more accurately than NPD sales numbers at this time. The amount of DKP price swing is irrelevant when it comes to profit opportunity. It's all about how off the market price is from true value.

The trading volume of the Metacritic future is very low...not a whole lot of people posting orders. Do people know that the Metacritic futures are IPOing at the same time as the monthly sales futures?

@KultofCows,

As always, good points (same to the users that posted similar thoughts about quality and sales).

Maybe I just see it as pointless for titles like Zelda and Halo (guaranteed to be highly rated). If it becomes a regular future then it might be more interesting.

@jameseyryan,
I think you are overestimating how hard it will be to predict review scores, particularly in terms of getting enough info. I agree with you partly, but also think that as a community we can gain more insight than we think we'll be able to at this very moment. Some people will have read previews, participated in Betas, played demos, or followed some games very closely. If they share some of this info we gain insight, and this feature will encourage social discussion to some extent. Sure this future will probably be more volatile than most, but not all, other stocks. But that will make it different, which is good, and interesting. As we get more users, this should progress.

@Powertrade,

I am aware that metacritic doesn't review themselves. I was not aware that they weight the reviewers. Do they disclose how they weight them i.e. who they weigh heavily/lightly? I have only just tried Lair as an experiment but I added up the scores and divided by the number of reviews right now (24) to get 54.375 when the metacritic score is 54. Is that just coincidence on my part?

I have to be honest, i'm a little skeptical of this idea. I really don't want to be because it encourages more people who are active with games to play the games and post reviews here and talk about the quality of the game in general which will increase intelligent discussion as we had all hoped for, but I think there may be a flaw in this.

For the gaming industry we predict on the basis of hype, precedent for previous versions or similar games in a particular genre, target market for the game, time of year for release, attachment rates, install base, reviews etc. i.e. we have a lot of things to take into account and that can be a lot of information at our disposal to make our predictions with the more info leading to more accurate predictions.

If we were to trade on metacritic scores we are essentially trading on what X number of people think of the game. This "target market" is miniscule compared to what we are used to trading on and therefore can vary in great degree. For e.g. in sales we can generalise that a certain proportion of the market like hardore games, platform games etc and are likely to buy said games. To get the same kind of info that I mentioned in the paragraph above, essentially we need to know who's reviewing the game in advance of the review and also we would need personal info of their favourite genres, games they bought, enjoyed, biases they may have in the console war, the mood they are in when playing the game, writing the review etc.

Without that, it is essentially guesswork because before a game is released and reviewed what info do we have? Hype and Content Releases from the game producers. If a reviewer is worth his salt then hype should not affect his review (but surely if hype wasn't taken into account then all reviews would post a score with little variance, but look at the range Lair got, 30-90), and content releases would show all aspects including faults in the game design, which they don't as they are essentially biased to build up hype for sales. So in essence all we are trading on is "is this game overhyped for what it is?" We can do this for sales based on the information at our disposal as I have said but, we are essentially trading blind on reviews.

I don't want to seem critical but I may be because I am tired at the moment and I would like others to come and point out things I may have missed here either for or against. Depending on the potential gains I see I will use this feature and if it turns out that it works and we are accurate in predicting game review scores then I will happily welcome it.

Also, as a suggestion for this type of future. I think you should freeze it prior to/or as soon as any open betas and/or demos are released that let people get an early hands on.

@KultofCows,
Ah my bad, I understand.

So metacritic futures will pay out an extremely low amount of dkp? For instance if you predict a score of 85 and the game gets 90, you're only earning 5 dkp? Wouldn't it be better to make the score worth 1,000 dkp per 1 dkp metacritic score?

I think paying out three days after the game is released is a bit too early.

I'm not familiar with the MetaCritic score dynamics, but I watch closely how popular games fare on GameRankings. There you will see big name sites set on a score almost simulatenously with the game release (when the embargos drop, I presume); however, in the next month or so dozens of smaller sites add their reviews, usually dragging down the score with their attempts to be seen as more objective, or the fact that they are specialized and review games quite outside of their field of competence.

I suggest using at least two weeks after the game release, preferably a month.