Get the Jump on Game Stocks With Virtual Market

Pachter says it's too early to tell if the simExchange's predictions are reliable, since the criteria for prediction is unclear. "Many of their game predictions are for lifetime sales, so they won't be measurable for more than a year from now," he says.

The exchange's lifetime sales forecasts can also be confusing to investors and difficult to quantify into a publisher's quarter or fiscal year.

But Jesse Divnich, an analyst with the site, says the predictions can still give a glimpse into key trends sweeping through the business.

For instance, the console lifetime sales predictions could be helpful for investors who want to judge which publisher is in a better position, he says.

The simExchange currently predicts that Nintendo will sell over 100 million Wiis, while the Xbox 360 and Sony's(SNE) PS3 are likely to move 50 million devices each.

In this case, investors can focus on the break-up ratio, says Divnich. "They can see the Nintendo Wii is expected to outsell the other two by 2 to 1," he says. "Then they can analyze publishers more effectively by seeing, for example, publisher A only has 10 out of 100 SKUs from their 2008 product line-up coming out for the Nintendo Wii, while Publisher B has 50 out of 100 SKUs."

For now, the simExchange is a bootstrapped site with two employees, Shiau and Divnich, and no real business model. But Shiau hopes to eventually scale up the site and generate data that can be sold to analysts and publishers.

He promises investors will continue to get free access to data. And if they get tired of losing money on real-world stocks, they can always place some happy virtual trades.

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