In a thread on here, someone wrote this:

Bookers need to include the video game industry in their betting markets. Imagine placing a bet with odds of 30,000/1 on Wii U selling 240 million and winning it.

And that reminded me of prediction markets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market

Idea is people buy and sell outcomes to predictions and try to make money.  I am NOT saying to use real currency, BUT an idea i had would be able to make a game on here to see who the top predictor is on this site, and run various predictions of sales and whatnot.

Has something like this ever been considered for this site?

Problem is getting all users to agree on a real source for sales.

VGC data has its issues.
NPD and others are only regional and are not easily attained.
MSonyTendo don't update often and are shipped figures.

So, if we keep this local to VGC we can all agree on VGC, but then what about changes to the data? Do we make cutoffs etc?

Additionally, we always have periodic prediction leagues. Especially during holidays.

It could be used for an extension of the prediction league and a way to do a scoreboard.  Would need to use VGChartz, and i see lifetime sales to be out.  Perhaps opening month,and predicing what VGChartz finds.

Great idea!

It would go beyond what the prediction league is doing.  It would be interesting to see who does what with it.

Back when we were changing things up to be gamrConnect the big idea I had and still love was a subforum for user bets. Place that you could finalize the conditions and the cost, have a moderator preside over it, and then make sure the loser adhered to the agreed upon punishment.

Sadly it didn't happen, but I thought it would've been really fun.

A prediction market is a variant on betting.  It works more like a stock market.  People buy and sell bets and they raise and lower based upon market activity.  It was found that this approach actually worked well for predicting things.  It also works fairly automatically, so you don't need to have people administer it.  Click on the link in the first post to Wikipedia to get an idea on this.  

good idea... hope VGChartz can make this happen. Being a good predictor will no longer be a claim lol.

Prediction market beats Pachter and gets spot on Gametrailers.com

What do you think about Knew The News?

http://www.knewthenews.com/

The site allows you to create a private prediction game, with a closed user group. This feature has not been announced publically, but it would be ready to go - you can take a look on the test site for it:

http://tst.knewthenews.com/

Are you interested? Just let me know!

Cheers!