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> I'm far from a statistician, but the difficulty in the study seems to be that you have products which are radically different from each other in demand struct
by pseut 14y ago
> I'm far from a statistician, but the difficulty in the study seems to be that you have products which are radically different from each other in demand structures.
>How do you tell whether the sales delta is driven by DRM or a much, much higher quality artist?
I'm not going to weigh in on DRM vs. non DRM, but you'd get around that problem by explicit randomization. If you have enough observations then differences in quality, etc., literally average out. If you have more information up front you can randomize conditional on the observed characteristics, which reduces the number of observations you need.
- darth_aardvark 14y agoThey only average out if they're uncorrelated. I'd say it's pretty likely that high-budget, expensive games are more likely to be released with DRM than low-budget indie ones. You could try randomizing on budget, dev size, etc..., but there's really so many random variables to account for in game development (expected sales? platforms released on?) that you'd need a ton of data before you really got something that's statistically significant. Although I'm no statistician either, so whatever.
- pseut 14y agoYeah, I should clarify that I meant you could do it if you control whether they're released under DRM or not. If a group of indie developers wanted to pool together and run an experiment, they could do it in a way that was really informative about its effect on revenues (the conclusions might not hold up if you tried to extrapolate too far beyond indie games though). I agree that the existing data aren't much like the random experiment I was talking about.
- wtvanhest 14y agoMaybe, but what if indie games are less susceptible to piracy than blockbuster games. There are really just massive statistical hurdles to overcome with this type of analysis. You could prove that indie games with strict DRM will perform differently than indie games without strict DRM, but extrapolating that to feature, blockbuster games is problematic.