I recently got a message that my use of Unity Personal (my Unity license) was revoked, and that has me wondering why it’s the case. Unity Personal is for any individual, organization with revenue under $100,000 from Unity, and I’m obviously well within that category – my Unity revenue, in effect, does not yet exist. I used Unity once for a $64 freelance gig. I have made $4 from ads on Unity project sites. None of this makes sense as a reason. I used a VPN once – literally one time on a desktop – for reasons entirely unrelated to Unity and Unity identified the failure of Unity on that system soon afterward as a bug, not an indication that I’d done anything wrong. I have no explanation for Unity’s revoking my license, I have in no way violated their terms. The only thing I ever did that might explain this is either a mistake on Unity’s part due to incompetence, or vindictiveness due to my fairly mild criticism of the engine due to the recent Unity controversy involving greedy leadership. I wanted Unity to be a good game engine. I wanted it to thrive because I have had games in the works using it. The fact that they shot themselves in the foot made comments at the time and noting the fact that I was starting to look into an alternative, open-source engine Godot, relatively polite and harmless under the circumstances.
So basically what this means is if Unity Technologies fails to resolve the revoked license and reinstate it, I am stuck with a choice to either:
rebuild entire game dev projects in a different engine, setting everything back by maybe a year or more of work minimum including learning the new software and figuring out a new way to do everything on a list of different projects that have been using Unity.
Or move ahead with Unity and upgrade to a month of Unity Plus/Pro one time every 12 months roughly, which I find unpleasant but am gradually coming around to as possibly a least costly option. My time has value and I poured a TON of time into Unity projects, I really wish to get them over the finish line. And delaying a year or more runs serious risks of the projects not being done at all (ever) due to outlying improbable-but-still-possible risks of geopolitical chaos, personal health risks, or some other surprise near-future incident on an individual, family, national or international/global level causing me to be stuck unable to work on them. Definitely thinking in terms of the notion of Memento Mori, accidents, black swan events, and the unit of measure known as a mort. (probability unit of death in increments of 1/1000 odds of death) which, let’s be clear, there are a few of them every passing year even if world conditions are stable and you’re only in ‘midlife’. I am basically thinking now in that sort of ‘get previously started things done, pause, reconsider before committing to huge new ones’ phase where I need to work on my backlog of huge epic productions and not commit to anything new if the new thing could exceed a total of a full week of labor. [eg an occasional small project like the new 3d asset packs announced on itch.io, that is one thing – I can have that over in under 50 hours, or maybe a short video I’ve been hoping to make forever, but giant stuff, nope, not starting any new huge stuff for a while.
So here’s my current concept:
A Unity Plus license acquired for one month later this year. Likely September. Until that point, projects that had been slated to release soon are on hold, won’t be released as playable. That means Astounding Worlds, Crowdsourced Adventure will be stuck for a few months unless the Unity revocation gets reversed.
Plans for addons to those two slow and big updates arrive once a year in waves – revenue builds up for a year following initial release and I gauge options for what could be added the following year.
That’d be a poll, here and there, on the ‘next thing’ every time revenue builds up to a range where an addon is mostly funded and viable. And that keeps going until the next month I have Unity output ability. I have found I can still work in the Unity editor with a revoked license somehow, it just keeps me from exporting anything out of the editor to a fully playable form. I can still build stuff and test within the editor. Just not release.
What that means is work would continue year round, a bit here and there as funding emerges. If the funding exists to cover it, there could be a full year of no new content and then boom, suddenly two, three, four or five new worlds to explore all at once. Each year, if the support from players is present.
I will also, this summer as September looms close, be posting a reasonable number of screenshots of various areas and other preview material pulled from the editor. You’ll be able to see what’s going on even if the content that exists is not yet available to play. And given no more than a month of actual work remaining on these two projects combined, and a release target of September when I can cover the near-$800 cost of launching a whole pile of stuff on Steam, Epic, itch.IO and also covering the $200ish one-month Unity upgrade, all that means is other things will move forwards faster than games in public’s view UNTIL that month. But that gets me time to save up spare cash.
During that time, when not dealing with Etsy buyers, goals will mainly cluster around new product lines of a non-game sort – texture packs, 3d packs, new Etsy listings, stuff of that nature. There were asset packs starting development in 2021, 2022 that moved slowly and even now aren’t quite ready to launch. So those along with recent in-the-works packs and updates to existing ones, that all gets going really fast for the rest of May, June… watch for that to be a big deal on itch.IO where there’ll be thousands of new things [texture and 3d files] posted across about 8 different asset packs. If that sounds good, this is even better:
They all go on sale, all that new material on top of already existing thousands of assets, for less than $2 COMBINED every once in a while. An outstanding option nobody seems to have really taken seriously until I participated in the Palestinian Aid Bundle. That bundle ended with the outcome of thousands of new visitors to my itch profile, hundreds upon hundreds of downloads of the texture pack that had been in said bundle, now nearing a thousand even after it’s over… and a batch of five-star reviews of that asset pack, all those ratings accumulating, and the last sale I had there, was unannounced Mother’s Day thing that got dozens, almost a hundred visitors looking at that sale page. It was only there for 24 hours. But still it went well. It was in fact the most widely visible sale I’ve ever had. So now I am planning three more one-day sales:
-Memorial Day
-Father’s Day
-July 4th.
Each will be preceded by actual [really substantial] long-awaited updates to my asset packs and collections. All these should be taken seriously as opportunities for anyone who is interested in any way, in 3d art or game development.
BONUS: On Memorial Day 2024 I’ll be setting up some absurd sales on HornbostelProductions.com in particular. There will be Itch.IO discounts, and Etsy discounts too, but the HornbostelProductions ones will be truly crazy – we’re talking 97-98% off on digital products, 75-90% off on physical ones.
Why the **** would I do that? Simple, I’m really hoping to get things rolling here. Etsy’s fee structure is eating up 10+% of my sales, up from the 5% norm three years ago. I see no indication fees will not keep rising there. So although the prices on my own shop are ALREADY about 10% lower than on Etsy, I’m willing to discount REALLY HEAVILY if that gets me a first wave of sales, reviews on my own shop. Once again: All transactions handled via Paypal/Stripe. I never at any point have actual access to any of your your financial data. It’s all SSL-encrypted to the fullest extent possible with Comodo SSL. The prices will be absurdly low and you’ll think, wait, how is this possible? It’s possible because I’ll be embracing a major loss on the sale. It’s possible because I’ve set a limit to how many items can sell of each type during the sale, keeping the total potential for losses at about $175. That also means some items will go out of stock when this happens. If you’re reading this now, you have an edge as you know it’s happening soon and will be able to jump in first on the best stuff before anyone else can claim it.
All I ask: Please post a review/feedback after the fact. That’d be amazing.
UPDATE: Unity Technologies – after roughly a week – responded to a message I sent them and offered a number of avenues to explore regarding a possible fix. The engine is indeed kind of broken for now, and the easiest fix – using Unity Hub – is not so easy to solve as Unity Hub hasn’t worked for me in months – but there’s enough to go on that I may still be able to troubleshoot this and get it fixed. However, considering the issues I’ve run into here, a pileup of problems on Etsy and a broken monitor that took days to replace, which was the cause of delays for a number of Etsy buyers… as well as an effective additional delay on game dev work, and some other issues here at home… even if things are resolved with Unity soon it seems likely all prior launch estimates are about a month or so too optimistic. If everything works out, maybe figure on a launch in late June for Crowdsourced Adventure, early August for Astounding Worlds.
I cannot see these happening any earlier however at this time.