Marvelous Interactive’s Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace for the Wii will debut on the simExchange on Tuesday, April 24, 2007. The game will be categorized under the Strategy genre. Shares will open for purchase at 50 DKP (forecasts 500,000 copies sold worldwide over lifetime).

Harvest Moon is a series of farm simulation games that date back to the SNES release in 1997. You plant seeds, grow crops, maintain a home, and build personal relationships with the townspeople.

Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace, the Wii installment of the series, continues the same formula as that has been successful over the years. You move your character and navigate the menu using the nunchuk. You use the Wii-mote to perform actions such as hoeing your farmland—in true hoeing action. Other examples are shaking the Wii-mote to plant seeds.

The game is scheduled for release in Japan on June 7, 2007. The listing was submitted by Renegade242, championed by Simulazn, Jayen, Csinning, and Starless.

March console sales were released by NPD yesterday and the results disappointed expectations of both Wall Street analysts and the simExchange video game prediction market.

Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian had predicted March sales in the US to be flat with February, which were 335,000 units for Nintendo Co Ltd’s Wii, 127,000 units for Sony Corp’s PlayStation 3, and 228,000 for Microsoft Corp’s Xbox 360. On the other side, Michael Pachter was expecting growth in March, forecasting 400,000 units for Wii sales, 165,000 units for PS3 sales, and 250,000 units for Xbox 360 sales at in the US. Pachter also predicted the Nintendo DS to sell 250,000 units and the PSP to sell 210,000 units.

Trading on the simExchange the night before NPD’s release had instead pointed to slight growth over February, expecting Wii sales of 385,000 units, PS3 sales at 144,000 units, and Xbox 360 sales at 231,000 units. The simExchange also forecasted 492,800 units for the Nintendo DS and 180,500 units for the PlayStation Portable. The simExchange appeared to share the analysts’ overly bullish forecast on the home consoles, but appeared to be very close on the portable consoles, off 2.9% on the DS sales and less than 1% on the PSP sales.

Although PS3 sales slightly missed the market’s expectations with just 130k units sold, PS3 shares were only down 0.13% to 5,706.13 DKP (forecasts 57.06 million units globally) as traders believe the console’s true growth story is still intact.

Xbox 360 shares declined 0.74% to 5,347.83 DKP (forecasts 53.47 million units globally) following the console’s 32,000-unit miss.

The Nintendo Wii actually closed 3.89% higher to 7,122.76 DKP (forecasts 71.23 million units globally) as traders dismissed the system’s unexpected low sales to supply constraints that do not affect the long-term demand story.

The Nintendo DS rose 1.75% to predicting 84.26 million units sold globally while the PSP shaved off 0.70% to predicting 37.67 million units sold globally.

The simExchange will begin trading US April 2007 console sales hybrid futures tomorrow. Like stocks, the prices of the hybrid futures on IPO day will remain the same all day. The mechanics will remain the same as trading the US March 2007 futures contracts. Once again, the contracts forecast the sales data NPD will report.

Xbox 360 US April 2007	20 DKP	200K units
PlayStation 3 US April 2007	15 DKP	150K units
Wii US April 2007	30 DKP	300K units
Nintendo DS US April 2007	50 DKP	500K units
PSP US April 2007	18 DKP	180K units

Hybrid futures for games are still pending. Issues we are still examining are which games to list and at what prices to launch the contracts. Suggestions for a better IPO price determining process are always welcome.

So now you’ve got a taste of what futures contracts are like...shorter-term projections and an expiration process. New questions like "to close out the position before expiration or let it expire?" now ring through your head. As the simExchange evolves its futures market, you learn what exactly are these derivative contracts.

The next lesson in your adventure to learn more about futures is that the "futures contracts" on the simExchange are not really how futures in the real world work at all. As you may have noticed, when going long on a future, DKP is deducted from your cash pile, and when shorting a future, DKP is added to your cash pile. This isn’t really how futures trading works. Most people will never trade a futures contract in their lifetime, but with today’s online trading, the barriers to accessing more sophisticated products are decreasing for the average investor and it is good to learn how it really works.

As mentioned in So what exactly are these "futures?", a futures contract is an agreement between two parties to trade something at a set price at a set date. If you are the buyer, you are obligated to buy at the set price on the set date. However, you do not pay until you actually buy the thing on the set date. No cash changes hands when you enter a futures contract. Instead, you must post margin (make a security deposit) with your broker to cover potential losses. The amount that you have to deposit varies with the risk of the contract you entered. When your losses on the contract exceed the amount of deposits you have left with your broker, the broker will call you every day in what is called a “daily margin call” and ask you to deposit enough cash to cover the loss.

What difference does this make? In the simExchange you have to pay cash for the future. In the real world you merely make a deposit--the money is still yours so you still earn interest. Since you don’t currently earn interest in the simExchange game, this would not appear to be a big deal. However, in the real futures market, you only have to deposit a small percentage of the contract value as margin, not the 100% cost on the simExchange. This would allow you to achieve great leverage, playing $10,000 of contracts with just $1,000.

The difference is more substantial on the seller’s side. On the simExchange, the shorter actually gets DKP when shorting the futures contract. In the real futures market, the shorter enters the contract and posts margin in the same way the buyer does.

In fact, other than expiring, the simExchange futures do not actually function as futures. Part of this is to aid the learning process of helping players think about futures after just learning about stocks. The other part is that we have not yet decided how the sophisticated margin rules of trading futures should be translated in a way appropriate for the simExchange community. For now, you can think of futures contracts on the simExchange as "hybrid futures."

Electronic Arts Inc’s (NASDAQ: ERTS) Def Jam Icon (Xbox 360) rose 12.39% yesterday to 40.81 DKP (forecasts 408,100 copies sold globally) following NPD’s report that the game sold 148,000 copies in the US in March.

The game stock had traded in the 32 DKP range for months before climbing 15.8% prior to NPD’s data release. Chatter on the street began building expectations that the game had a strong March debut. These expectations were beaten by the data in NPD’s report, making the game stock the best performing stock on the simExchange in yesterday’s trading. Def Jam Icon (Xbox 360) continues to rise today, up 6.05%, to a global prediction of 432,800 copies.

All futures have been paid out. As previously mentioned, we apologize for the bumpiness regarding when NPD would be releasing March 2007 US sales data. After deep deliberation, we have considered all trades up to the point we closed trading of the US March 2007 futures to be valid.

The logic is that data is commonly leaked and priced into the real financial markets. There is always a probability that data will emerge earlier than expected and traders will price that information into the stock prices before other traders have the chance to take advantage of that data. This has commonly occurred when sales data emerges around the Internet and is priced into the simExchange stocks.

We are also aware that some other prediction markets allow trading to fully price in information before the contracts are locked for expiration. We had hoped to avert this because we understand that it also becomes very easy money; however, similar situations do occur with simExchange stocks when the sales data has surpassed the current prediction and players jump in to buy shares that are guaranteed profits. Furthermore, players trading on data they found on forums around the Internet were not trading with any ill intent to manipulate prices.

As previously noted, this was a test process. Suggestions for the future are welcome.

We have been informed that there has been some confusion regarding the simExchange, LLC's relationship with the NPD Group following our press release about our new futures product. As stated in the press release, the simExchange, LLC is not affiliated with the NPD group in any way. The simExchange has not formed any kind of partnership with the NPD Group. The NPD Group neither endorses nor supports the simExchange or the futures contracts traded on the simExchange in anyway beyond providing data.

NPD has provided the simExchange US March 2007 sales data. We had originally put an expiration date of April 20 on the futures contracts because that was the date originally provided to us for the data release. We apologize for the inconvenience and confusion this may have caused. As previously noted, March futures were a test run of the new futures market and the process will be improved. The results of NPD US March 2007 Futures Contracts are:

Hardware

Software Top 10

Since Crackdown (Xbox 360) did not make the Top 10, the future expires at 0 DKP. DKP payouts will occur soon.

Check out the simExchange’s second press release, this time announcing the new futures market for predicting monthly NPD sales data. Predictions for NPD’s March 2007 data is included.

Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIII for the PS3 will debut on the simExchange on Monday, April 23, 2007. The game will be categorized under the Role-Playing genre. Shares will open for purchase at 425 DKP (forecasts 4.25 million copies sold worldwide over lifetime).

Final Fantasy XIII is the next installment of the Final Fantasy series and the first for the PS3. The game will feature real-time game play in a similar fashion to Final Fantasy XII (PS2). Battles will feature a new Overclock system instead of the usual limit break system. An Overclock meter builds and once it is filled, you can use it to slow down time for everyone except your characters.

The player takes the role of a girl who calls herself “Lightning.” She is one of the common citizens who live in the Pulse. Their world is governed by the people who live in Coccon, a floating fortress that hovers above them. The game’s focus is the story of those who resist their tyrannical rulers.

The game’s listing was submitted by Literati.