Yahoo's Tech Buzz Game Shows MMO, Portable Trends

Author: by David Jenkins, Simon Carless

Yahoo! has begun a new feature in its 'Research Lab' section called The Tech Buzz Game. The game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts and trends and tasks a player with predicting how popular various technologies will be in the future. Not only is the concept entertaining in itself, but it offers an interesting insight into some current 'buzz' regarding games, since some of the grouped market areas in the game are video game related. In particular, the MMORPG market area shows World of WarCraft is by far the most popular game at the moment in terms of imaginary investment by players of the Tech Buzz Game, with a current 'stock price' of 24.79, compared to just 4.31 for the next-most popular pick, City Of Heroes. The PSP is similarly advanced in the portable console market, with a price of 7.49. Further down the list of popular picks, however, even the Zodiac and N-Gage are beating the Nintendo DS, which ranks low in terms of buzz with a 1.54 price. Although the charts are not necessarily a reliable measure of current trends and interests (something offered on a commercial scale by GameSpot's Trax and IGN's Gamermetrics services), it is, in the meantime, at least an amusing diversion.