Comment by 4bpp
7 years 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.
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.
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".
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.
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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.