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The Staff of SOH
fsafranek
SOH-CM-2024
It's easier to get GPS coordinates for a pickle jar (you can stand over it) than a shack (can stand next to it).
:ernae:
C
Cerberus
Guest
I am very happy using the flight1 wrapper system them seem like a good trustworthy company, but they do have some strange policies about selling planes on their website I do not like. If you sale on their website they not only charge you a higher percentage for their website but they force a higher percentage for sales that you get on your own website as well. When you pay to host files yourself and work hard to get attention to your own website I don’t think you should be charged more. I’d be happy to give them the 30% the other venders take, but I am not going to pay 30% for sales I get from my own website.
Your lucky to have a job were you can work, and earn money. I dont have that luxury. Flight sim market goes to ****, im living in a card board box. Im thinking that refrigerator box in the dumpster just tossed is looking mighty roomy...
C
Cerberus
Guest
I've been out of college for 7 months now and the job market isn't all that great looking lol and it is getting worse, but I am happy to say I've dared to chase a dream in hopes that it might support my simple lifestyle.
Maybe this is not helpful -- certainly it won't be to Cerberus -- but I'm not convinced all is quite so doom and gloom on the FS sales front. A few months ago, I might have agreed. In the wake of Tongass Fjords X being released, however, I'm much more optimistic. Our sales outstripped my wildest expectations for the first month. Based on that, I'd say there's still very much a market for add-ons. Maybe expectations or tastes are shifting, but it seems people are still very willing to buy. Having said that, the market for military add-ons has always been a small fraction of that for civilian planes and scenery. Heresy to say that here in the Combat Flight Center, I know, but it seems to be true.
One formula that's worked well for me in the past few years is what I call the "freeware percentage". I've found that if you can locate a high-quality piece of freeware that's similar to something you're considering releasing as payware, look at the numbers of downloads. Flightsim.com and Avsim (when they're back up) provide this information freely. As a rule of thumb, I count on about 2%-5% as many sales. So, if the freeware gets 10,000 downloads, you can be relatively sure of selling about 200 to 500 similar items as payware. So far, that's been a good indicator of overall community interest.
Then again, it may all be bollocks. :ernae:
:ernae:
One formula that's worked well for me in the past few years is what I call the "freeware percentage". I've found that if you can locate a high-quality piece of freeware that's similar to something you're considering releasing as payware, look at the numbers of downloads. Flightsim.com and Avsim (when they're back up) provide this information freely. As a rule of thumb, I count on about 2%-5% as many sales. So, if the freeware gets 10,000 downloads, you can be relatively sure of selling about 200 to 500 similar items as payware. So far, that's been a good indicator of overall community interest.
Then again, it may all be bollocks. :ernae:
:ernae:
C
Cerberus
Guest
Spotlope it isn't all doom and gloom. In fact the past two months have been the best SkyUnlimited has seen all year, but it would seem that the hundreds of others developers and probably thousands of products on fspilotshop sold fewer than we did.
The bulk of all sales comes in the first month a product goes on sale, and the majority of sales come from my own website not fspilotshop, but I was still really surprised to see a plane we have had selling for more than 6 months out sale all of the other aircraft products and do so with only 53 sales. Maybe the list isn't accurate, but if it is it tells me that nobody else is doing any better than we are, especially the brand new products that were released this month.
The bulk of all sales comes in the first month a product goes on sale, and the majority of sales come from my own website not fspilotshop, but I was still really surprised to see a plane we have had selling for more than 6 months out sale all of the other aircraft products and do so with only 53 sales. Maybe the list isn't accurate, but if it is it tells me that nobody else is doing any better than we are, especially the brand new products that were released this month.
robrealair
Members +
There is no doubt that piracy is utterly killing the flight sim addon economy. When the last addon company finally shuts up shop, it won't be the recession you'll blame, although that is one contributory factor. It will be the vast droves of casual freeloaders who, in very large numbers, download torrents worth (pun intended) of aircraft and scenery, sometimes justifying doing so with ever more creative excuses.
A successful addon eight years ago could confidently expect 3000-5000 sales or more. In the last year, equivalent software of like quality is lucky to sell 1000. In many cases, rather good addons which appeal to a niche portion of an already niche market can make as little as 300 sales. Any addon seller that tells you otherwise is telling fibs. Clearly, for some niche developers this makes hundreds of hours of devoted development time nothing more than a virtually unpaid hobby. The average addon for FSX is the equivalent of a short shopping trip to pay for essential supplies for two people for one day. That is hardly expensive. In real terms, most addons are cheaper than they ever were. There are exceptions to this, but in the main it is true.
One customer of ours thought it was ok to "try before buying" one of our products and felt that, having eventually purchased (probably because he wanted official support), it was perfectly ok to let me know that finally he'd been "honest". He also excused himself with the cliche that he'd "recommended" our product to others, and therefore was doing us a "service". He didn't of course indicate whether these others actually pirated our product as well, but my guess is that they all did.
Anyone who questions or criticises relatively bland activation methods would do well to absorb the alarming statistics that the opening post in this thread succinctly explains. But there are two levels of activation. One is, to a determined freeloader, relatively easy to overcome. The other, requiring a double layered security procedure, is what puts people off buying at all, and quite understandably they object to having to run through hoops because of other people's behaviour. The double layer activation system closes many piracy loopholes, but I would guess has a significant negative impact on sales.
Developers are therefore struggling to overcome a problem for which there is really virtually no solution - but zero tolerance to any kind of piracy is a start. In cases where there is a dispute after a genuine purchase, buyers can generally speaking unilaterally rescind their credit card payment as a last resort even where the seller refuses to refund, but in practice I don't think refunds are a problem where there are convincing reasons for offering one, even where it is not stated as official policy.
In nearly a decade of activity, we have only had to refund about six customers on the basis that they couldn't make our products work. I think any decent developer refunds rather than face a protracted fight. Therefore, with certain well known exceptions (developers who treat their customers with contempt) which are evident from a few minutes research, the often claimed reason for piracy: that the developer did not offer a demo, is not a valid excuse. In addition, usually within just hours of release, nearly all new addons are commented on by a large number of public forum posts. There is now plenty of information to inform a buying decision.
There are other factors having an impact on the dismal current climate for FS addons (and do not believe anyone who claims otherwise). One significant factor is that customers are becoming more and more demanding. This means that development time for the average addon is now twice as long as it was say five years ago. A professional and respected developer now needs a substantial number of sales just to recoup investment after up to two years with little or no income. At exactly the time when MS has pulled the plug on FSX for the time being, and in despite of the behaviour of bankers and governments causing an unprecedented recession, there are now a very large number of payware houses popping up to climb on a non-existent bandwagon. Some of them are producing somewhat mixed quality addons and they are all competing for an ever diminishing slice of a shrinking cake.
This has a squeezing effect on the better products, which are now often lumped together in a confusing and chaotic market that is subject to the growing trend of website reviews, often sloppily written, which are no longer reliable in some cases, because there is a growing commercial link between so-called independent websites and products, and in this atmosphere it is difficult to establish whether editorial independence is upheld. There are noble and notable exceptions to this, and Avsim is one of them, having a review board whose job it is to moderate reviews to establish fairness and balance. That commendable system is rarely the case with other websites.
Things are further complicated by the exponential growth of affiliate sellers or re-sellers. Some of them do a good job, claim a fair commission and work hard. Others, frankly, are merely climbing on a perceived gravy train, do almost no work for their commission and in some cases do not even host the product but merely act as a weblink from a threadbare page advertising the addon. In many cases the bandwidth, file hosting and other costs are entirely born by the original developer who nevertheless pays a hefty commission.
This often results in some affiliate sellers making a fair amount of cash in return for little work, with the combined marketing of a large number of products, while the individual developers make very little. An affiliate re-seller having a total product count of fifty to a hundred titles has very little interest in each individual item. What matters to him is the total number of sales. Similarly, re-sellers often have no particular interest in quality, only in quantity. As with all things, there are noble exceptions.
Further pressure is applied to developers who see affiliate sellers attempting to drop prices to compete, creating a domino effect and accusations from some that the developer is "ripping off" its own customers through trying to maintain a reasonable price for its work. The current discounts on offer are in my view a reflection of a misplaced desperation on the part of some sellers to remain competitive. It won't work, since there is a baseline price below which no developer can survive. Despite complaints that payware is becoming too expensive, in fact the vast majority of established developers have held prices well below the accumulated inflation rate and in our case current products, which now involve at least twice the work compared to previous one, are in fact cheaper in real terms than they ever were.
The ever growing number of here-today, gone-tomorrow flight sim websites further fragments an already fragile framework. Established websites are of course entitled to an income, but some of the recent additions are poorly run, charge for membership but without any value offered in return, and are constantly demanding freebies from developers on the basis of offering a review which either never appears, or eventually turns up after a long delay as a few hurriedly written, mispelled lines with basic grammatical errors, and mistakes as to the content of the package, or critiques which are clearly errors as a result of not even reading the package documents.
The solution to this growing unreliability is of course the forums, which nowadays have far more power than any website review. However that in turn imposes a great responsibility on posters not to post gratuitously biased or agenda-based criticism - something that is not always adhered to.
Thus, it is getting ever more difficult to create, market and sustain even a good product at precisely the time when economic conditions are already at their worst.
It is for this reason that piracy has reached a state where, combined with other factors, it is killing off the whole flightsim business by slow but sustained strangulation. One day, sim enthusiasts will wake up and find that there are no addons left to buy. It won't happen tommorow, or next month, but unless something significant occurs, the pirates will win, because the fact is there is no way to stop them. The only recourse the sim community has is to name and shame and to use social means to condemn them, publicly, privately and through any other means. That might sound a rather pathetic answer, but there is no other answer.
The now growing solution of requiring permanent online connection even to just RUN a piece of software (see Rise of Flight) is an absurd and silly attempt to address the piracy problem and is entirely counter-productive. But it is not surprising to see this happening. I fear though, that measures like this will simply turn off the honest customer even more.
The only thing that will promote the survival of a shrinking industry, apart from getting rid of the worst of piracy, is for developers to make all efforts to deliver a sound and reliable good quality package, to treat their customers with respect (and support forums alone do not always achieve this - what is needed is a fast and reliable e-mail response). But equally customers have it in their hands to behave honestly, to be measured, balanced and fair in their criticisms, and not to relentlessly expect miracles from products which are built upon an already flawed core software requiring a great deal of time and energy to blend with.
These are, by the way, personal views.
Rob Young
A successful addon eight years ago could confidently expect 3000-5000 sales or more. In the last year, equivalent software of like quality is lucky to sell 1000. In many cases, rather good addons which appeal to a niche portion of an already niche market can make as little as 300 sales. Any addon seller that tells you otherwise is telling fibs. Clearly, for some niche developers this makes hundreds of hours of devoted development time nothing more than a virtually unpaid hobby. The average addon for FSX is the equivalent of a short shopping trip to pay for essential supplies for two people for one day. That is hardly expensive. In real terms, most addons are cheaper than they ever were. There are exceptions to this, but in the main it is true.
One customer of ours thought it was ok to "try before buying" one of our products and felt that, having eventually purchased (probably because he wanted official support), it was perfectly ok to let me know that finally he'd been "honest". He also excused himself with the cliche that he'd "recommended" our product to others, and therefore was doing us a "service". He didn't of course indicate whether these others actually pirated our product as well, but my guess is that they all did.
Anyone who questions or criticises relatively bland activation methods would do well to absorb the alarming statistics that the opening post in this thread succinctly explains. But there are two levels of activation. One is, to a determined freeloader, relatively easy to overcome. The other, requiring a double layered security procedure, is what puts people off buying at all, and quite understandably they object to having to run through hoops because of other people's behaviour. The double layer activation system closes many piracy loopholes, but I would guess has a significant negative impact on sales.
Developers are therefore struggling to overcome a problem for which there is really virtually no solution - but zero tolerance to any kind of piracy is a start. In cases where there is a dispute after a genuine purchase, buyers can generally speaking unilaterally rescind their credit card payment as a last resort even where the seller refuses to refund, but in practice I don't think refunds are a problem where there are convincing reasons for offering one, even where it is not stated as official policy.
In nearly a decade of activity, we have only had to refund about six customers on the basis that they couldn't make our products work. I think any decent developer refunds rather than face a protracted fight. Therefore, with certain well known exceptions (developers who treat their customers with contempt) which are evident from a few minutes research, the often claimed reason for piracy: that the developer did not offer a demo, is not a valid excuse. In addition, usually within just hours of release, nearly all new addons are commented on by a large number of public forum posts. There is now plenty of information to inform a buying decision.
There are other factors having an impact on the dismal current climate for FS addons (and do not believe anyone who claims otherwise). One significant factor is that customers are becoming more and more demanding. This means that development time for the average addon is now twice as long as it was say five years ago. A professional and respected developer now needs a substantial number of sales just to recoup investment after up to two years with little or no income. At exactly the time when MS has pulled the plug on FSX for the time being, and in despite of the behaviour of bankers and governments causing an unprecedented recession, there are now a very large number of payware houses popping up to climb on a non-existent bandwagon. Some of them are producing somewhat mixed quality addons and they are all competing for an ever diminishing slice of a shrinking cake.
This has a squeezing effect on the better products, which are now often lumped together in a confusing and chaotic market that is subject to the growing trend of website reviews, often sloppily written, which are no longer reliable in some cases, because there is a growing commercial link between so-called independent websites and products, and in this atmosphere it is difficult to establish whether editorial independence is upheld. There are noble and notable exceptions to this, and Avsim is one of them, having a review board whose job it is to moderate reviews to establish fairness and balance. That commendable system is rarely the case with other websites.
Things are further complicated by the exponential growth of affiliate sellers or re-sellers. Some of them do a good job, claim a fair commission and work hard. Others, frankly, are merely climbing on a perceived gravy train, do almost no work for their commission and in some cases do not even host the product but merely act as a weblink from a threadbare page advertising the addon. In many cases the bandwidth, file hosting and other costs are entirely born by the original developer who nevertheless pays a hefty commission.
This often results in some affiliate sellers making a fair amount of cash in return for little work, with the combined marketing of a large number of products, while the individual developers make very little. An affiliate re-seller having a total product count of fifty to a hundred titles has very little interest in each individual item. What matters to him is the total number of sales. Similarly, re-sellers often have no particular interest in quality, only in quantity. As with all things, there are noble exceptions.
Further pressure is applied to developers who see affiliate sellers attempting to drop prices to compete, creating a domino effect and accusations from some that the developer is "ripping off" its own customers through trying to maintain a reasonable price for its work. The current discounts on offer are in my view a reflection of a misplaced desperation on the part of some sellers to remain competitive. It won't work, since there is a baseline price below which no developer can survive. Despite complaints that payware is becoming too expensive, in fact the vast majority of established developers have held prices well below the accumulated inflation rate and in our case current products, which now involve at least twice the work compared to previous one, are in fact cheaper in real terms than they ever were.
The ever growing number of here-today, gone-tomorrow flight sim websites further fragments an already fragile framework. Established websites are of course entitled to an income, but some of the recent additions are poorly run, charge for membership but without any value offered in return, and are constantly demanding freebies from developers on the basis of offering a review which either never appears, or eventually turns up after a long delay as a few hurriedly written, mispelled lines with basic grammatical errors, and mistakes as to the content of the package, or critiques which are clearly errors as a result of not even reading the package documents.
The solution to this growing unreliability is of course the forums, which nowadays have far more power than any website review. However that in turn imposes a great responsibility on posters not to post gratuitously biased or agenda-based criticism - something that is not always adhered to.
Thus, it is getting ever more difficult to create, market and sustain even a good product at precisely the time when economic conditions are already at their worst.
It is for this reason that piracy has reached a state where, combined with other factors, it is killing off the whole flightsim business by slow but sustained strangulation. One day, sim enthusiasts will wake up and find that there are no addons left to buy. It won't happen tommorow, or next month, but unless something significant occurs, the pirates will win, because the fact is there is no way to stop them. The only recourse the sim community has is to name and shame and to use social means to condemn them, publicly, privately and through any other means. That might sound a rather pathetic answer, but there is no other answer.
The now growing solution of requiring permanent online connection even to just RUN a piece of software (see Rise of Flight) is an absurd and silly attempt to address the piracy problem and is entirely counter-productive. But it is not surprising to see this happening. I fear though, that measures like this will simply turn off the honest customer even more.
The only thing that will promote the survival of a shrinking industry, apart from getting rid of the worst of piracy, is for developers to make all efforts to deliver a sound and reliable good quality package, to treat their customers with respect (and support forums alone do not always achieve this - what is needed is a fast and reliable e-mail response). But equally customers have it in their hands to behave honestly, to be measured, balanced and fair in their criticisms, and not to relentlessly expect miracles from products which are built upon an already flawed core software requiring a great deal of time and energy to blend with.
These are, by the way, personal views.
Rob Young
jmig
SOH-CM-2025
Thank you Rob for taking the time to write such an enlightening post. I found it to be very informative and succinctly expressed your precipitation of the situation we all face, developer and consumer alike.
As a consumer and former real world pilot, I would like to say thanks to all developers of flight sim add-ons. You have no idea how many hours of joy and pleasure you have given me in my hobby.
So, to the freeware hobbiests like Piget and jdhaenens, to one man shops like Lionheart and SkyUnlimited Productions, trendsetter companies like Realair and A2A all the way to the flight sim factories like Aerosoft and Alphasim; To all of you I say thank you for adding to my life.
As a consumer and former real world pilot, I would like to say thanks to all developers of flight sim add-ons. You have no idea how many hours of joy and pleasure you have given me in my hobby.
So, to the freeware hobbiests like Piget and jdhaenens, to one man shops like Lionheart and SkyUnlimited Productions, trendsetter companies like Realair and A2A all the way to the flight sim factories like Aerosoft and Alphasim; To all of you I say thank you for adding to my life.
Well I for one can honestly say that I dont have a single pirated plane on my pc and have bought heaps of addons for fsx. Well, because of my work i can afford it, but then again i am very rarely home to use them anyway. I have seen addons for ileagle download, nearly got tempted once, but with all the things that have being done with fsx i would rather support the makers. Yeh one day, their will be a bunch of lowlifes complaining because they cant get any more addons for their pc, because their wont be anyone buiding them anymore, Wont they feel stupid. Actually i am not sure they are smart enough to feel stupid!!
- Thou shalt not steal. Period, full stop. It's very discouraging -- from a moral, let alone a financial, standpoint -- to see all of the pirate and torrent sites that come up on the first page of a Google search. When I was researching Xload a couple days ago -- yes, I really am that cheap -- about a quarter of the links on the first screen were to warez sites. Not tempting to me, with a good job and no children; but to someone in his twenties, with no job and maybe only one parent to teach him right from wrong -- "bait on purpose laid to make the taker mad."
- Where do I buy from? I prefer to start with the developer's website. I like to buy in US dollars where possible -- but that's thrift again, not chauvinism.
- I do respond to sale prices like the ones that PC Aviator, A2A, and FlightSim.com have offered recently. Rob, I take your point about sustainability. But for products that have been out for awhile, a sale can revive interest in something that people weren't buying anyway. (I'm thinking here of Cerberus's point, that most products do their best numbers in the first month.) I wouldn't have bought MegaScenery Oahu at the regular price: not because the regular price was too high, in any absolute sense; it just wasn't something that kept tugging at my wallet. (Also, I didn't realize how well it would actually work!) Same for A2A's 3D lights, which I bought on sale several weeks ago. But if I had your products, I wouldn't put them on sale either; there are only a few, and they seem to be holding their value.
Chuck_Jodry-VJPL
Charter Member
Piracy CAN be dealt with , all of the companies i model for do much the same thing , if no valid licence is detected the VC or Gauges vanish , it’s not fool proof but highly resistant.
Market Fragmentation CAN be lived with being that many of the developers are not really doing this to make a living but because they are enthusiasts in their chosen field be it scenery or Aircraft.
Any single element can be overcome but the combination of all the elements is killing the breed, or perhaps breeders of the addon market , it’s no fun anymore , everybody seems to be taking things so seriously , revenues are so low that companies go to extraordinary lengths to not pay their people , time and time again i see honour give way to predatory business practices , the result being trust is taking a back seat to caution , that results in products not being built because cash up front isn’t available to fund new developments and those who do the work have been stiffed often enough to be wary.
But the last straw is the “ Fun Factor “ , when all is said and done that is the reward most worth having and its one of the least attainable elements in professional development for the current market .
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com
fficeffice" /><o> </o>
Good Post Rob .
Market Fragmentation CAN be lived with being that many of the developers are not really doing this to make a living but because they are enthusiasts in their chosen field be it scenery or Aircraft.
Any single element can be overcome but the combination of all the elements is killing the breed, or perhaps breeders of the addon market , it’s no fun anymore , everybody seems to be taking things so seriously , revenues are so low that companies go to extraordinary lengths to not pay their people , time and time again i see honour give way to predatory business practices , the result being trust is taking a back seat to caution , that results in products not being built because cash up front isn’t available to fund new developments and those who do the work have been stiffed often enough to be wary.
But the last straw is the “ Fun Factor “ , when all is said and done that is the reward most worth having and its one of the least attainable elements in professional development for the current market .
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com
fficeffice" /><o> </o>Good Post Rob .
Tim has a valid point, I really got into this hobby (FS98) because of the amount of free stuff available. We, the FS users demanded better and better quality stuff (being quite hard on developers who 'fell short of the mark' too) until the very 'cream' of developers were often forced (by the shear amount of time it takes nowadays to build a 'quality' product) to try and claw back some income, if only to pay for expenses, for research tools and travel to museums etc.
I know of several developers who did this and are now returning to freeware, as (mentioned here already), there is no longer a marketplace (due to less users and piracy) worth remaining in. Payware has also left a rather bitter taste for them too, as the marketing/sales folks seem to take the lion's share of any profits.
I used to be a 'serial downloader', but with a few exceptions (UK2000 Vol2 for example), I try and limit my new aircraft to freeware releases nowadays, and possibly fly about 25% of the time I did 5 years ago.
I think we are looking at the dying days of this hobby, not helped by MS!
<!-- / message --><!-- sig -->
Sorry, but I don't believe for a second that these are the dying days of flight simming. We maybe a small community but we spend lots of money. As long as I'm alive I'll be flight simming and I know people with the same passion (aviation) will keep building sims and planes. Just my thoughts.
robrealair
Members +
Piracy CAN be dealt with , all of the companies i model for do much the same thing , if no valid licence is detected the VC or Gauges vanish , it’s not fool proof but highly resistant.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com
We'll have to look into this. I didn't know it was that easy to do. Thanks for that Chuck.
Rob
M
MCDesigns
Guest
Some very enlightening reading (thank you Rob!!) and some thoughtful posts. I'm with Jesse on keeping the community strong, moving forward and commend his free giveaway idea (I have much more respect for a vendor that still gives to the community).
I have to agree with Mud that I don't feel the community is dying, rather it just seems like it at times because addons take so much longer to produce now that the time between them makes us think there is nothing new in the way of addons.You guys do a great job of pointing out new releases and as my job of pinning this notices for all to see, some days there is nothing, but others the sticky list is a mile long, LOL. I visit all the other forums and will say this, the amount of support I see here, for both payware and freeware is amazing. Look at how long the freeware Nimitz thread went or how many pages Dino's F-14 is. This is the kind of support that will keep this community going and it's all because of you.
This piracy issue really makes me see red and is the main reason I haven't done more with my commercial work (outside of FS). Seems for every legit piece of digital hard work, some scum bag loser thinks they have the right to give it away to others. I actually found my GF using a torrent site the other night looking for a payware program that she wanted for free. We got into a heated moral/ethical/legal discussion that is still not resolved and will more than likely end with a break up and I view her justification of what she was doing as stealing, plain and simple, black and white. (she didn't enjoy being called a theif, but hey, if the shoe fits!)
I have to agree with Mud that I don't feel the community is dying, rather it just seems like it at times because addons take so much longer to produce now that the time between them makes us think there is nothing new in the way of addons.You guys do a great job of pointing out new releases and as my job of pinning this notices for all to see, some days there is nothing, but others the sticky list is a mile long, LOL. I visit all the other forums and will say this, the amount of support I see here, for both payware and freeware is amazing. Look at how long the freeware Nimitz thread went or how many pages Dino's F-14 is. This is the kind of support that will keep this community going and it's all because of you.
This piracy issue really makes me see red and is the main reason I haven't done more with my commercial work (outside of FS). Seems for every legit piece of digital hard work, some scum bag loser thinks they have the right to give it away to others. I actually found my GF using a torrent site the other night looking for a payware program that she wanted for free. We got into a heated moral/ethical/legal discussion that is still not resolved and will more than likely end with a break up and I view her justification of what she was doing as stealing, plain and simple, black and white. (she didn't enjoy being called a theif, but hey, if the shoe fits!)