This study is pointless unless you actually could do the measurement with a more protected game version as well (which for obvious reasons is difficult to do). What really matters is not how many people downloaded a "free version" of the game but how many actually paid. The number of paying customers might very well be higher than if the game hadn't been pirated at all. The mere fact that the game was made available (to a certain degree) is not enough to make any conclusions for or against more content protection nor can we use this information to estimate how much more money the producers would have made with a different strategy.
Code is pretty or even beautiful when it matches the expectations. In particular, management thinks the code is beautiful if a programmer can spend a deterministic amount of time on a task and be done with it. The same programmer thinks the code is beautiful when he spent less time on it than he expected. A user of the program thinks the code is beautiful if it doesn't crash and doesn't waste the resources on his computer.
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This study is pointless unless you actually could do the measurement with a more protected game version as well (which for obvious reasons is difficult to do). What really matters is not how many people downloaded a "free version" of the game but how many actually paid. The number of paying customers might very well be higher than if the game hadn't been pirated at all. The mere fact that the game was made available (to a certain degree) is not enough to make any conclusions for or against more content protection nor can we use this information to estimate how much more money the producers would have made with a different strategy.
Code is pretty or even beautiful when it matches the expectations. In particular, management thinks the code is beautiful if a programmer can spend a deterministic amount of time on a task and be done with it. The same programmer thinks the code is beautiful when he spent less time on it than he expected. A user of the program thinks the code is beautiful if it doesn't crash and doesn't waste the resources on his computer.