Olas said:
You're joking right? Jim is the lord of all things true and righteous, his word is objective scientific truth by the very nature of it coming from Jim Sterling. Perhaps in the future you could be more respectful and appreciative of what Jim does for us.
Science ain't about your pseudo-religious idol worshiping. It's time to school you about how wrong Mr. Stirling is.
"Right now though, the Playstation 4 is killing it on the console scene and it deserves to come out on top as a result. That's just well a scientific fact."
While current sales trends do lend support that the PS4 is outselling the Xbone, the term 'killing it' lacks any quantification and further more is not previously or else where defined. Additionally, it cannot be used in a literal form as neither console is alive and capable of dying nor capable of killing anything directly (unless there is some fault which causes fires or some such that I have never heard of, which should probably be extrapolated upon if true). Thus this statement conveys no information to the viewer about how much the Playstation 4 is out competing the Xbone, only that it is. Very unscientific Jim. Furthermore the statement it deserves to come out on top is a value judgement and statement of opinion. The very language used prevents it from being a scientific fact. If you were to be generous to Mr. Stirling, and were to replace "deserves" with "will" or "has a high probability", both of these terms as well as Mr. Stirlings statement overall (not to take him out of context) imply causality. There is simply no evidence to suggest causality in anything Mr. Stirling has stated in the video.
To demonstrate causality, the best way would be to formalize the hypothesis and perform an experiment. In such a scenario, the hypothesis that supporting Indy developers and Indy content leads to successful console platforms seems appropriate given the context of the rest of the clip. A simple experiment would be to change the Indy game policies of Xbone, PS4, Wii U and Steam and measure how they impact sales. If PS4 strategy of picking only the best Indy games results in a significant increase in all consoles sales vs other strategies, than indeed we have scientifically demonstrated that Mr. Stirling's opinion was correct. However this hasn't been done. Additionally, if we do not observe significant results for all consoles, then it is unlikely that this is the determining factor for a game consoles success. Additionally, if we see a significant increase, but not a complete reversal of Xbone and PS4 sales data when their Indy developer policies are reversed, we can conclude that while a contributing factor, it is not the sole factor for a consoles success. This approach could be applied further, by changing MS and Sonys entire or partial business strategy (which ever you argue is most significant) in a similar method as above.
However such an experiment is highly unlikely to happen as we can't control companies policies for experimentation. A more plausible way to explore this statement would be to look at sales data and perform some statistical analysis to find correlations. For example, we could see if number of Indy titles available correlates with console sales or if number of Indy sales correlates with console sales. In this regard however, it is important to remember that correlation does not imply causality. An equally plausible explanation for such correlations is that the more popular a console is the more games are sold on it, including indy games. Therefore, let me restate that correlation does NOT imply causality. Even if such information was available (and I'm sure that MS and Sony both do look at such data) it cannot be stated as a scientific fact using such correlations as evidence.
There you go. Mr. Stirling has just demonstrated how wrong he can be with such a lingual faux pas ironically in an episode where he spends the end continuously repeating how he is right.
Sorry Mr. Stirling, but you are WRONG. (Although your opinion throughout the rest of the clip maybe correct).
