Shares of Namco Bandai Holdings Inc.'s Hellgate: London (PC), +2.42 (+3.06%), an upcoming first-person shooter role-playing game, declined this week following the announcement that the game may require a monthly subscription to play at its full potential. The game is developed by Flagship Studios, a new studio featuring many developers of Blizzard’s best selling Diablo series.

Developers say they are considering additional revenue models in addition to a monthly subscription, including selling downloadable content. They are also considering offering some online mode for free--but what this entails is unknown. Bearish sentiment arose because few games using monthly subscription models have been widely successful in the past. On Saturday, January 13, Hellgate: London (PC) closed down 2.41 DKP to 79.20 DKP (forecasts 792,000 copies sold worldwide over liftetime).

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 will debut on the simExchange on Tuesday, January 16, 2007. It will be categorized under the Adventure genre. Shares will open for purchase at 30 DKP (forecasts 300,000 copies sold worldwide over lifetime). The release for this game is scheduled for January 22, 2007. The listing was submitted by zukaus. The game's page is found here. The summary of the game is:

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 (known as "Wish Room" in Japan) is a new adventure game on the Nintendo DS unfolding a gritty, graphic mystery in 1979 Los Angeles. The player takes the role of Kyle Hyde, an ex-cop turned salesman who is tracking down his missing friend. Clues lead Hyde to Room 215 of an old hotel, a place rumored to grant wishes. Hyde ends up staying there the night and the game's story unfolds from here as Hyde encounters some very strange characters.

The game is played exclusively using the stylus with the DS turned on its side. The background and maps are in full color but characters appear in black and white.

Just as you view Popular Articles, you can now view the most popular comments by the simExchange Community on the new Popular Comments page. Comments are sorted by each comment’s Popularity Index, which is calculated using user votes with time decay.

The Closing Price Tool for Bloggers has been updated. The new version includes displaying the percent change of the stock for the day specified. A problem where the background would overlap with the tool has been fixed. The tool now supports text wrapping so that it will fit in your text more naturally (like a magazine layout). You will have to replace your code with the new version if you want to use this version on your blog. Get the new version here.

Shares of Call of Duty 3 (PS2), +1.40 DKP (+2.63%), rose sharply on Thurday as NPD reported December sales of the PS2 version to be 365k copies. This was much higher than the market had been expecting for the PS2 version of this popular PC first person shooter. Call of Duty 3 is the first Call of Duty game to appear on PS2. Many traders were uncertain how a PC FPS would be received on the PS2 platform and instead considered the Xbox 360 version as the choice for most first-person shooter players (there is no PC version of Call of Duty 3). It appears the PS2 continues to show legs as new games for the platform exceed expectations.

Call of Duty 3 (PS2) closed at 48.66 DKP (forecasts 486,600 copies sold worldwide over lifetime) on Friday after rising 4.79 DKP (9.84%). Shares have continued to rise, trading at 54.58 DKP at the time of this writing.

You can now view articles sorted by Popularity Index on the new Popular Articles section. The Popularity Index is calculated using votes with time decay. The highest listed article in the section is the article that has the highest Popularity index. The last listed article on the third page is the lowest of the top 30 articles. Articles will ascend in the pages if they receive more votes. Articles will fall off these pages as their Popularity Index decays over time. This feature is still under testing and may require tweaking.

All known problems with the Your League and Friends List features have now been fixed. You can no longer make more than one friendship with a person nor make friends with yourself. All your friends and yourself should appear correctly in the Your League rankings page now. Please report any problems you run into while using these or any features on the simExchange.

A bug where not all of your friends would appear in Your League rankings has now been fixed. However, there is another bug where your friends may appear twice if you have two friendships with them (another bug). These bugs should be fixed soon.

Based on user feedback, articles on the stock pages are now organized by a new Popularity Index that takes into account how long ago the article was submitted in addition to its votes. This way newer articles can more easily be prioritized over older articles so that a highly supported article from a month ago proclaiming 1 million copies sold is not prioritized over an equal quality but new article proclaiming 2 million copies sold.

Additionally, from the stock articles pages, you can now sort articles by submission time to just view the most recently submitted articles for a particular game. This should make it easier for users to find new articles rather than feeling good but new articles are “buried.”

Due to market manipulation in Forza Motorsport 2 (Xbox 360), all Forza Motorsport 2 trades have been rolled back to pre-manipulation point.

The average purchase price of your Forza Motorsport 2 position may appear incorrectly for those who were affected by the roll back. The actual cost, however, has not actually changed.