"This positive effect of illegal downloads and streams on the sales of games may be explained by the industry being successful in converting illegal users to paying users," the study authors write.
That said, the same study finds that piracy has the more-expected negative effects on sales of films and books (and a neutral effect on music), singling out games as one area where piracy really does seem to work differently. The 306-page "Estimating Displacement Rates of Copyrighted Content in the EU" report (PDF) points out a number of caveats for this headline number, not least of which is a 45-percent error margin that makes the results less than statistically significant (i.e. So it's more than a bit surprising that an exhaustive study of piracy's effects by the European Commission found that "illegal consumption leads to increased legal consumption." To be more precise, the study estimates that for every 100 games that are downloaded illegally, players actually legally obtain 24 more games (including free games) than they would in a world in which piracy didn't exist.
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