3 ms·

The quoted blurb (I haven't checked if this checks out in the study proper) does seem to suggest that at least in some cases, the report found the positive resu

by 4bpp 9y ago

The quoted blurb (I haven't checked if this checks out in the study proper) does seem to suggest that at least in some cases, the report found the positive result that it isn't harmful: > On the contrary, in the case of video games, the study found the opposite link, indicating a positive influence of illegal game downloads on legal sales.

thisisit 9y ago
Sounds like a case of "correlation implying causation". If a game is famous ie downloaded a lot from legal sales then it does stand to reason that there will be a huge number of people trying to illegally download it too.
- 4bpp 9y ago
  Surely this is an obvious thing to control for; if they didn't, it would conversely be extremely implausible that they would find any sort of "piracy is harmful" effect for any other category, which the article seems to say they did for "recent top films".
  - KekDemaga 9y ago
    How would you control for that in a real sense? Often "we controlled for" means we made some pretty big logical leaps that we justified with statistical handwaving in my experience.
    - pas 9y ago
      These considerations are usually elaborated at length in the studies. And usually take more things into account that what people think about in the first 5-50 minutes after hearing about the study. That said a lot of studies are crap, maybe the conceptual framework is sound, but they botched the mathematical parts (the stats handwaving), or the sample size is too small, so even if the math is beautiful, the study is meaningless. Now, for these data from the real world studies the controls are the differences between individual games/movies/albums. Because there are games that take more time to upload (because they take more time to crack, or the game publisher aggressively started to shut down torrent trackers). For movies and albums I don't know what kind of controls they came up with, but they can look at IP addresses of big torrent swarms and asking film studios for marketing spending data and then later cinemas for seats sold data, and try to look at the signals. (Did downloads with a lot of IP addresses from a state had an affect on cinema tickets sold in that state? Is there a per movie difference? Is there a common cause variable - they can try to control with DVD/Blueray/video-on-demand sales.)
- boomboomsubban 9y ago
  If that were the cause it wouldn't be unique to games. There's little difference between piracy and the demo/shareware model that is common in gaming, the pirated version often lacks updates and online play leading a fan to buy the game.

by 4bpp 9y ago

thisisit 9y ago

Sounds like a case of "correlation implying causation". If a game is famous ie downloaded a lot from legal sales then it does stand to reason that there will be a huge number of people trying to illegally download it too.

4bpp 9y ago
Surely this is an obvious thing to control for; if they didn't, it would conversely be extremely implausible that they would find any sort of "piracy is harmful" effect for any other category, which the article seems to say they did for "recent top films".
- KekDemaga 9y ago
  How would you control for that in a real sense? Often "we controlled for" means we made some pretty big logical leaps that we justified with statistical handwaving in my experience.
  - pas 9y ago
    These considerations are usually elaborated at length in the studies. And usually take more things into account that what people think about in the first 5-50 minutes after hearing about the study. That said a lot of studies are crap, maybe the conceptual framework is sound, but they botched the mathematical parts (the stats handwaving), or the sample size is too small, so even if the math is beautiful, the study is meaningless. Now, for these data from the real world studies the controls are the differences between individual games/movies/albums. Because there are games that take more time to upload (because they take more time to crack, or the game publisher aggressively started to shut down torrent trackers). For movies and albums I don't know what kind of controls they came up with, but they can look at IP addresses of big torrent swarms and asking film studios for marketing spending data and then later cinemas for seats sold data, and try to look at the signals. (Did downloads with a lot of IP addresses from a state had an affect on cinema tickets sold in that state? Is there a per movie difference? Is there a common cause variable - they can try to control with DVD/Blueray/video-on-demand sales.)
boomboomsubban 9y ago
If that were the cause it wouldn't be unique to games. There's little difference between piracy and the demo/shareware model that is common in gaming, the pirated version often lacks updates and online play leading a fan to buy the game.