How would you propose that such a study be performed?
The same game released with and without DRM? Different games with and without DRM?
The same game released with and without DRM? Different games with and without DRM?
Then I would collect data on piracy rate vs initial buy rate vs long tail and find product types that share those. Then, with all that data, one can start looking into DRM and individual products from groups with shared economic traits but which differ primarily on the DRM question. With a decent sample size, some kind of answer should pop out.
That would be my guess of a simplified study. Statisticians and economics has surely more to say on this and where the corner cases are. There might also be smaller studies to do if one accept some early assumptions.
How do you tell whether the sales delta is driven by DRM or a much, much higher quality artist?
If someone is out there on HN with some ideas, I'd love to hear them, not for this problem (I don't really care), but for other problems that may be difficult to solve later on.
>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.
Although I'm no statistician either, so whatever.
I agree that the existing data aren't much like the random experiment I was talking about.
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.