| cjsoto said: I don't take issue with the would-be debunkers' study design, but I DO disagree with their interpretation of the results. If 15.8% of the variability in game sales can be explained by variability in game ratings, that means the correlation between sales and ratings is r = .397. A correlation of this size lies somewhere between a medium-sized effect (one noticeable by a careful observer, about r = .30) and a large effect (one obvious to an observer, about r = .50; Cohen, 1988, 1992; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size). The bottom line: 15.8% might sound like a small amount of explained variability, but most statisticians would consider this evidence of a moderate-to-strong association between game ratings and game sales! |
I wouldn't call them "would-be debunkers", it was just an earlier study on the same subject (the study in the New York Times is the most recent one), and that's the only reason I included it, as relevant background information.
Sorry if that was unclear, I just did a quick copy-and-paste job instead of really explaining things.
Personally I think both GochayeX's criticisms of the new study and cjsoto's criticisms of the old study may have some validity. Actually, I really have no idea, but I still find this stuff fascinating!
We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai
It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick
