I read today that it’s estimated 90% of people playing the full PC version of World Of Goo have a pirated copy (note: the authors 2Dboy chose not to include any copy protection). Edit: For those being pedantic about this figure, here’s how it was estimated; but arguing the exact number is chronically missing the point.
You see, this is why PC gamers can’t have nice things anymore. It’s why desperate publishers reach for horrible, broken DRM measures to try to stamp out piracy, universally failing of course and often upsetting the small minority of paying customers they have left into the bargain. This is why games companies like closed, proprietary boxes which are harder to crack (without resorting to often detectable hardware modification). It’s sad, because it’s these jerks which are increasingly making the PC primarily ‘the WOW platform’.
People who rip off the good work of hard-working small developers like this are, without exception, reprehensible, despicable little sods. No excuses – don’t give me that crap that you pirated it because you didn’t know if you’d like it; play the damn demo instead. And if you couldn’t afford it – well, if you can’t afford something you don’t get to have it, you whining, self-righteous little crybaby.
Everyone who complains about copy protection on Steam, and DRM in general should stop and do something practical instead. Ask PC gamers you know or encounter about how many pirated games they have in their collection. Then, kick them in the nuts (because let’s face it, most of them are going to be male) precisely that number of times. Steel toe-caps are an optional but recommended accessory. Make a note to do this every week until they buy real copies.
I can understand (but not condone) poor students dabbling in pirated super-expensive pro software that they couldn’t possibly afford, in order to expand their education (luckily, most companies do educational or cut-down versions these says of course). But for frivalous entertainment, when the price isn’t high, and especially when this is a small company who happens to have come up with something great and needs a revenue stream to do more great things, it’s just unforgiveable.
But, no doubt the little buggers will continue to get away with it, and turn the PC into a place where only subscription-based products will turn a reasonable profit for their creators, and self-contained product won’t sell well enough whether they’re crippled with DRM or not. No doubt the pirates will be justifying their actions with stupid excuses while they ride the platform into the grave. Well done, gitbags.
November 14th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Yes, it’s quite a plague. When I had released my first game some months ago I was quite impressed by the amount of google hits I received by people who searched for a crack and/or key of my game.
Too bad for 2D boy as well, but at least they are pretty popular and I read they still make quite a profit. And they deserve it, the game is great. (And uses a neat sound library, hehe)
November 14th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
In my case I was ready to buy the game in Steam, but apparently it got cancelled in Europe (see http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/10/15/world-of-goo-vs-european-steam/).
So I ended up pirating it for a while, even though I still play to buy it one of these days.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
So just buy it direct from 2Dboy right now and import it into Steam if you really want to. There’s really no excuse for this, sounds like you’re kidding yourself into thinking it’s ok because it’s ‘temporary’ (and maybe you’ll just forget in the end). Bollocks, you *can* buy it right now, you just chose not to because the Steam issue gave you a way to justify it to yourself. It’s like saying ‘oh, the shop I went to was closed so it’s their fault I had to break in, I couldn’t be bothered to go to another one’. It’s really NOT ok.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
hehe, Steve that was the funniest post I’ve ever read on your site
. You made my day. A really good comparison. When I imagine this in real…
November 14th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
I agree with everything you’ve said.
When I was a young lad, I pirated crap like CRAZY (mainly the C64, Atari ST, Amiga days). I think back then I pirated stuff just to do it. I had so much stuff that I could never really play it all
. It was almost a contest between friends to see how much stuff you could collect.
I used to give people who would pirate something like 3DStudio a pass. Especially if they weren’t really doing anything commercial with it and it was around $3K just to “play around with it”. These days I think people should just try to get an educational copy or use something free (Blender or Truespace for instance).
I hate things like SafeDisc and much prefer Steam-like DRM systems. The argument there is always “well what if I want to play this game 10 years from now and Valve no longer exists?”. I can understand this for nostalgia reasons, and it would be nice if Valve had a plan for letting “anything go DRM-wise” should they ever go belly up. Honesty though, exactly how long should you expect ANYTHING you buy to function for the rest of your life? Maybe a pacemaker one way or another…
It looks like PC gaming is dying for everything but subscription games. It’s a shame, because a mouse and keyboard still blow away any console controller for a huge chunk of games.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
I don’t really associate those people as customers though. They might be playing the game however that doesn’t mean they ever had any intention of buying the game, therefore they shouldn’t be included in “lost customer” figures.
Also it’s a useless statistic unless you can compare it to a VERY similar game with locked up DRM so tight that it is impossible to pirate.
I didn’t know anything about this game until you mentioned it just now which tells me that World of Goo suffers from a marketing problem.
Compared to consoles there is no central location where developers can put their products on the PC, it means they need to do far more marketing to get people to even notice their product exists.
I’m happy that World of Goo is on impulse, however I think impulse needs to be 1000 times more popular before it becomes as useful as xbox live (everyone under one roof).
I don’t see that happening which leads me to believe that what the PC really needs is a popular application which connects to multiple stores such as impulse, steam, etc from which the customer has all pc applications they can purchase under one searchable application.
Now you pointed it out it looks fun, think I’d probably buy it however I’m really busy with work right now and the last thing I need is to be distracted by games. : )
November 14th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Interesting, I find holding a game controller a lot more nostalgic (read: fun), especially since a lot of games don’t require 100+ keys and a mouse.
“if you can’t afford something you don’t get to have it, you whining, self-righteous little crybaby.”
I don’t believe pirating is 100% bad. Of course the act itself is not justifiable, but the result in some cases is that people who would not normally play the game do, and spread the word about the product, leading to more sales. (I know you’re going to say all Joe’s friends will pirate the version, but I don’t believe this to be true in the majority of cases)
November 14th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
“I don’t really associate those people as customers though. They might be playing the game however that doesn’t mean they ever had any intention of buying the game, therefore they shouldn’t be included in “lost customer” figures.”
Sorry, irrelevant argument. If they play the game beyond the demo on a pirate version, they’re a lost customer, because if they wanted to play, they should have bought it. The fact that they spent the time to play the game means they are validly in that statistic. Again, it’s like justifying car theft by saying ‘Johnny would never have bought a Porsche anyway, so it’s not wrong if he steals one for a while – he’s not a lost customer so that’s ok.’. It’s nonsense and people delude themselves that it’s somehow different because it’s a game and not a car.
“I don’t believe pirating is 100% bad. Of course the act itself is not justifiable, but the result in some cases is that people who would not normally play the game do, and spread the word about the product, leading to more sales.”
Another common justification, but when there’s a demo you can use to evaluate & promote the game just as much, it just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The demo shows everything you need to promote the game – when someone pirates the full game, they’re not some white-hat viral promoter, they’re just a pirate.
People make excuses for this behaviour but the fact is that there are no valid excuses. Play the demo by all means, but as soon as you pirate it you’re crossing the line. I don’t care how pirates choose to try to justify it to themselves through all kinds of leaps of twisted logic, it’s wrong.
November 14th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Whoa! Steve! I never said it was “ok to pirate”, please don’t put words in my mouth like that.
I agree with you, the pirates should not be entitled to play games if they did not buy them. My point is about the false statistics generated, the 90% figure.
There is a certain demographic of people who will steal anything and will not make a single purchase of anything they can get off torrent sites. Measuring this demographic does not constitute a lost sale because even if the world of goo was impossible to pirate then those very same people would be pirating something else instead.
This is relevant because you are assuming that 5000 people illegally downloading the game equates 5000 lost purchases. What you are really seeing is 5000 people playing the game because they downloaded it for free illegally.
To sum up my point, lost sales != times illegally downloaded
You’re totally correct about the excuses people put out the justify pirating something.
November 14th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Yeah, Andrew, you’re right…kind of. But see it like this: Right now, 9 out of 10 persons play the game without having paid anything. Independent of why they do this it still means that if ONE MORE out of these 10 would buy the game, the revenue of the creators would be doubled! And this one person easily is one that found some excuse to pirate.
November 15th, 2008 at 1:03 am
That 90% is unfounded – they based it solely on number of unique IP address.
Many people play the same copy at work, at home or at their girlfriend’s, and ISP’s can vary the IP pretty much per day.
November 15th, 2008 at 7:38 am
World of goo is at a good price so there’s no excuse. But I’ve entirely stopped playing 99% of games because in Australia console games are ***$120***. The PC versions are usually $100, which is absolfuckinglutely insane and totally unjustifable. I don’t buy secondhand games either because the only reason I buy a game is to support the developer, not frigging ebgames. Someone needs to do an experiment with a 100% sure fire Halflife 3 style hit and sell it for $10. Just to see what happens. The originals would sell like crazy AND the secondhand market for them would be instantly killed. ‘But people have tried that’, no they haven’t, they’ve only done that on pissy little games.
November 15th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Yes, shame on you for not reading the whole story and just picking up on the 90% figure and running with it. That’s based on different IP addresses, as a previous commenter had said, and also has a number of other factors that make this number utterly unreliable. All it’s done is to get the ‘Piracy is rampant’ line all over lots of websites – again – with a psuedo-fact behind it. Bleh!
For the record, I think unauthorised copying is wrong, but this can not be interpreted as meaning that DRM is necessary, or that unauthorised copying is a bad problem. Just that someone can make headline figures out of nonsense. (Even 2DBoy doesn’t think DRM is any kind of answer to it, even if it is a problem.)
November 15th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Yeah, Steve is totally off base on this one. He’s gone off the deep end. Like what Vectrex and Marble stated in their response post, Steve is missing the point and suffers from blog bandwagon syndrome.
I wished for more people to pirate pc games (don’t forget console games too). I thank the lord that torrent sites like pireatebay exists. Without torrent sites, the customers are screwed over by the large corporate money hungry machine. In most cases, you can’t return software.
The general customer is brainwashed by the corporation from the loads of advertisement to buy a sub-par product. Then you’ve just spent your hard earned case on a crap product. So now you’re supporting more pc game crap and developement houses.
Pirating will cause the greedy game companies to start making good games instead of shoving out sub-standard games (madden ’08, madden ’09, madden ’99, or ww2 shooters). Do we really need another WW2 shooter in 2008? Where is the innovation? That’s what’s killing the pc game not piracy. Piracy actually is helping the PC gaming.
Think about all the drm crap that are coming out. I bought several games like spore and fallout 3 only to find that they both have crippling drm. That’s punishing the legitament buyer. If I spend $60 on your game, I expect nothing else but the game installed on my system. I expect no hassle at all. Instead, my cd rom stops working and my system blue screen on me.
I buy Stardock games because they don’t have drm in it. You say to install demo right? Well, guess what? They have drm in the demos too! Why the hell would I want to instead a drm crippled demo? The fact that it’s a demo which is free and they bundle drm in it is insane.
November 15th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
@SteveIsRubbish: If you don’t like the games coming out, the correct way to show your derision is NOT TO BUY THEM. You’re in a total fantasy land if you think that piracy is the way to prevent them making these games – piracy is like not buying them, except that you still play the game. How exactly does that make any sense? A customer that buys a crap product has only themselves to blame. If they’re ‘brainwashed’ by advertising they’re clearly too stupid to tie their laces in the morning too, and they deserve what they get. It’s not like reviews are hard to come by these days.
I agree that DRM is completely pointless and crap, but this is just an attempted (and failed) coping measure. It’s a symptom, not a cause (or maybe the 2 are self-reinforcing). DRM won’t go away unless piracy stops, or until companies realise that it’s useless (and 2DBoy’s results pretty much proved that but larger companies aren’t ready to make that leap yet), and meanwhile more DRM pushes more demand for hacked copies. It’s a death-spiral. I prefer Steam’s approach personally but enough people bitch about that too. Thing is, even if all DRM was removed, a large number of people will still find some other excuse to pirate – after all warez sites predate all the DRM currently about, all that’s changed is people’s ability to download it thanks to faster speeds.
@Everyone else: Look guys, the precise number doesn’t matter. Arguing minutae like this ignores the point.
The point is that piracy IS rampant on the PC – the fact that you can pick up pretty much any game you like on a torrent is universally a bad thing. Saying the numbers aren’t reliable (of course they’re not, they could never be), is completely missing the point and playing into the argument that it isn’t such a big problem and people are making it up, which they’re not. Of course it isn’t a justification for DRM, simply because DRM doesn’t work and just irritates genuine customers. It IS an argument for giving people who DO pirate games a massive slap around the head, which was the point of my post.
Whether 2DBoy lost 90% of the revenue, or 50%, or 30%, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference – the company is still getting ripped off. The ‘I wouldn’t have bought it anyway’ argument is total and utter bollocks – if they played it beyond the demo, they stole it, period. There is no grey area here despite what some selfish people will try to claim. If they couldn’t play it without paying, a reasonable proportion of these people would buy it, especially at this price – the ‘I wouldn’t have bought it’ argument is a smokescreen on many occasions in my experience.
Anyone who denies that piracy is a *real* problem for the PC as a games platform has their head buried deep in the sand. If you rule out DRM (and we all want to), that only leaves subscription systems and online activation to stop people pirating, and those have their own problems.
I do however agree that retail prices for games are a problem. But, independents like 2Dboy are offering real value with their price levels so they undermine the argument that piracy is all about price – although for some it might be, clearly there are plenty of people who will pirate cheap stuff just because they can. Interestingly I just pre-ordered Left 4 Dead for £17 on PC (~US$25), which I would call an absolute bargain, especially since I bought 2 (extra one for my wife’s PC), but this is the exception rather than the rule.
I think a combination of reasonable pricing, more direct connection between the money you pay and the creators of the product (ie fewer retailers and distributors skimming a ton off the top), and ritual humiliation of pirates may help. A strong line needs to be taken, IMO too often people who don’t like DRM or Steam etc can unintentionally act as apologists for piracy even if they don’t agree with the piracy itself, which has led to semi-legitimisation of the practice in online counterculture. Too often there’s an impression that piracy is ‘sticking it to the man’ like fat-cats at large publishers, or teaching them a lesson for using DRM or Steam. In reality it’s often just taking food out of small developers mouths, encouraging them not to bother with the PC anymore except as an afterthought (ie if it makes some money, great, but we’ll make the majority from consoles).
(clarification: I’m not saying anyone here is pro-piracy or is condoning the practice, and didn’t intend to give that impression before – except to the one guy that DID pirate the game, who needs a slap)
November 15th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
I personally can not understand the pirating of university students when there are free software solutions available such as blender, open office, gimp, even operating systems such as BSD and Linux.
You can argue that those software packages aren’t as nice however that’s just the way it is and it’s really not a justification for piracy when other solutions are available to you.
I guess you could argue that maybe no one knows such software exists however one quick Google search gives all this software to you by just typing “free X program” (replace X with modelling, office, image editing).
It brings me back to a conversation I overheard in the elevator at university between two women.
“I have a copy of 3DSmax you can borrow.”
“Did you buy it”
…silence…
…both start laughing…
November 15th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Just a note on the price tag of AAA titles: Players bring it upon themselves when they demand games to be more and more technically bloated (immense hardware requirements through bleeding-edge graphics, almost-realistic textures and models, renderes video sequences etc.). To produce games like these, teams of 50, 70 or nowadays even beyond 100 people work for a long period of time in the range of years to complete the title. These people are, to a large extend, specialists: Programmers, animators and the likes want to get paid more then a garage developer who basically exploits himself to realise his “dream game”. So we’re talking about many millions of dollars that need to be earned, just to cover the production costs. And, to ensure enough people actually buy the game, add the marketing costs on top (I won’t start an argument about profit, that’s a religious question).
November 15th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
This is very true, although of course movies require similar specialists yet DVDs are much cheaper. The difference is in market, revenue channels, and to some extent the toolsets, which are still too expensive (console devkits + Unreal 3 adds up). The market mainly though – movies not only have a much larger audience, but they also have many more distribution channels that actually earn money (cinema, DVD, rental, satellite). I think games can learn from this model though – disappointing though the Wii has been, it’s expanded the market which can’t help but pay off in the long run, and digital distribution should allow a more direct link between the money paid and the developer, which should allow cheaper prices (Steam, take note – in practice because of retailer discounting you’re actually more expensive a lot of the time). I think we’ve seen the peak of games prices, personally, because of all the factors that are acting upon it now.
November 15th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
So what can game makers *do*? Can they learn anything from the music & movie industries?
The media companies lost significant (all?) credibility by overstating the problem and using questionable statistics. Two specifics that already came up: comparing piracy to auto theft, and assuming a 1:1 ratio between pirated copies and lost sales. If game makers can avoid these, and retain credibility, they could keep the goodwill of their customers.
Are there any examples of what *does* work in a world where piracy is easy? Some I can think of off the top of my head:
Don’t worry about it. Sins of a Solar Empire is the poster child here…500,000 copies sold without DRM. Fans trading tapes of Grateful Dead concerts seems to be another example.
Subscription or online-only games: Working great for WoW…
Give the goods away. There are a few authors who seem to be making decent livings while giving their work away (John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow are the two I can think of). A few bands have tried this too. Authors can make money with speaking engagements, ads on their blog, selling books. Bands have merchandise, ticket sales. What do game developers have? Merchandise, certainly. Ads on their site (works great for desktop tower defense). Any others?
Is piracy bad for *every* developer, or only the bigger ones? I wouldn’t be surprised if more small developers fail because of obscurity than piracy.
November 15th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Of course as soon as I read your previous post another approach appears: serious games. Codemasters did a version of Operation Flashpoint for the Marines. Is it possible to build a reputation by giving away games, then parlay that into a contract to make serious games and simulators?
November 16th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Certainly pretending you can stop piracy on an open platform (DRM) is pointless. I think by exploring more direct-to-customer initiatives, building on a loyal customer base and getting your image out there, associated with your (hopefully) great independent games, is a step in the right direction. People are more likely to buy rather than pirate if they have a face to put to what they’d be stealing – it’s much easier to rip off a faceless corporation than a small bunch of guys who made a great game. Such techniques *should* allow developers to make their products cheaper too, and to explore alternative models like episodic and micropayment models (although the latter only really works at very large scales, so that’s a gamble that only really works for long-term titles like MMOGs). Piracy is immediate and impulse-friendly, so purchasing the product needs to be too; if you can find the legit game as easily (or hopefully more easily) than a pirate copy and the value statement is strong, hopefully that encourages people to buy.
Serious games is a growing market, but based on the companies I’ve talked to doing this, there’s a lot of specialism involved in most cases. Military apps is one case where games tend to be already very close to the sim, so leaping the gap isn’t that hard – in other cases the sim needs considerable extra investment just because the sorts of things you’re being trained in aren’t regularly in games, because they’re less exciting. Could you make a game out of an evacuation drill on a nuclear submarine? Maybe, but it would be a harder sell than shooting insurgents in the face. Maybe this goes hand in hand with being inventive about how you make serious games more interesting – after all, training is more effective when it’s enjoyable – but there is a limit to how much leeway you can give them without invalidating the training experience. I think there is probably still a chasm between serious games and regular games in terms of content which would make doing both outside of a few ‘exciting’ professions quite expensive in content. You could re-use tech & tools certainly, but the content & design synergies might not be quite as beneficial I think.
I don’t think that there’s a 1:1 relationship between pirated copies and lost sales, but my problem with people claiming the ‘it’s not a lost sale’ is that it also isn’t a 1:0 relationship, which means it’s losing the developer money no matter how you slice it. As for the publicity argument, I don’t buy it. The exact same amount of community buzz can be driven by people passing the demo around, the fact that you can get the full game for free does nothing over and above that, except allowing a group of people to play the whole thing without buying it. Yes, I could buy the argument if the game were only available on DVD, but today pretty much any game is available as a fully playable demo which is enough for evaluation and promotion purposes. Any publicity that is gained from the pirate copies could have been gained through a legitimate demo – the difference is that the demo contains a greater incentive to buy than the pirate version does. So therefore in the modern world, I think piracy is bad for developers of all sizes.
I do think that tech community role models have a duty to stop making excuses for piracy just because of the surrounding difficulties. If both groups push from both ends (developers trying new things, people on the ground saying developers deserve to earn a living), maybe open gaming platforms might be able to survive outside of subscription models. The last thing I want is for the PC to become just flash games and WoW, or a throwaway afterthought.
November 16th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Just wanted to say thank you, Steve. Thank you for finding the right words and thank you for putting up with those piracy advocates. Sadly, I don’t have the nerves to argue with them, I’d rather take the kick-in-the-nuts-approach you mentioned. And last but not least, thank you that as a developer you’re not giving up on the PC platform.
November 17th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
I completely agree with you Steve. I find myself needing to buy console versions of games I want to play, because companies like EA are putting ridiculous DRM systems in place, which really frustrates me as a buyer. This also reminds me of F.E.A.R. where every update I’ve applied to my copy caused the game to think it pirated until Securom release a new executable, which was released days later :S.
Although I have to admit that I fall in the same category as Kentamanos, in that when I was at school and university, I used to pirate a lot, but since then I destroyed all my pirated copies and have bought any games I wanted to play, as if it wasn’t worth my money it wasn’t worth my time.
I can see why student would pirate products like 3D Studio Max or Photoshop (although from what I understand both of these companies are trying to release cutdown versions for people to mess around with), as these students would most likely start jobs where these products are being used and, if they don’t have any experience with the product, employers might consider another applicant with experience. Although I don’t condone pirating and have used programs like Bender 3D and Gimp instead.
March 29th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Great, so that means that I can’t play Left 4 Dead since I borrowed it, and my friend already has used the code.
April 23rd, 2011 at 4:55 am
At the risk of resurrecting an old thread, I do not believe there are any logical reasons to justify pirating expensive software.
I used to pirate games when the Commodore 64 was new. I had about 750 games in my collection. I taught myself 6502 assembly language so that I could write a sector editor and pull the data off the floppy disk into a disassembler for the purpose of circumventing the copy protection. I even rewrote the loader for the 1541 disk drive so it would seek past track 35 and step between half tracks. It was fun and educational.
Then I started to write simple games in assembly because this was the only way to create a responsive game way back in the day. I had to plan timing loops, graphics memory allocation, write my own input/output subroutines and always, always watch my page boundaries. It was very challenging. This realization brought into sharp focus my own hypocrisy and ,as a result, all 750 games were binned.
As a mature student returning to school after many years, I purchased Adobe’s CS5 Master’s Collection. This is the student licensed version and is far less expensive than the retail version. Adobe let me know a few important things:
1 )I can purchase the next commercial version, at the upgrade price.
2) The license for my current product permits commercial use, so I don’t have to upgrade if I don’t want to.
This is an amazing initiative on Adobe’s part, and if you are any kind of visual arts student, take advantage of it!
My second example is the Autodesk Education Suite for Entertainment Creation 2011, which includes:
3DS Max
MotionBuilder
Maya
Softimage
Mudbox
Sketchbook Pro
For anyone reading this not familiar with the software, it is an industry standard used by many companies for creating 3D assets for movies and video games. It’s also very expensive. For example, this particular collection is about fifteen thousand dollars (U.S.) for a retail license.
I registered with Autodesk and now have a perpetual student license, which I am not permitted to use commercially. That’s fine with me because this whole package cost less than $400.00 U.S.
Please be aware that this software is identical in functionality to the retail version. The only difference that I am aware of is the licensing.
And for the record, I purchased World of Goo.
I enjoy paying for software because once you start creating some of your own, it becomes very clear how much hard work is involved.
Thanks, Mr. Streeting and Co., for OGRE. It’s a solid kilogram or two of code.
April 23rd, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Yes, I remember when it was impossible to learn to use applications like 3DS without piracy, unless you were enrolled in particular universities that had copies of it. These days, there really isn’t any excuse, software is more accessible to all than it has ever been, which is great.
April 23rd, 2011 at 3:37 pm
It was exciting when I discovered the open source movement and was able to use things like the GIMP (with it’s unfortunate name) and POV-Ray. For development, DJGPP and then Dev-Cpp were the tools of choice when I moved from the Amiga to the IBM compatible world. Now, we have Dreamspark and also the MSDNAA.
I’m pleased and surprised that this software is available even to those of us living in Canada. And yes, my front yard still has about a foot of snow in April. I will not take my snow tires off for a while yet.
As a Canadian, I’m apologize if my first post seemed arrogant. It’s hard to express amazement in just text alone.
As always, best to you.