sale – Hornbostel Productions Blog & Shop

Unity Personal license was revoked

I recently got a message that my use of Unity Personal (my Unity license) was revoked, and that has me wondering why it’s the case.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.

Etsy, itch.Io and other topics

News item #1 – I’m working on a bunch of things on itch.IO including updates to existing 3d asset packs, a massive overhaul of the older textures from 2013, a new European texture pack [built from photography I took myself in Austria, Switzerland and Germany due to a trip I was invited on in 2023] and a North Africa/Middle East 3d asset pack. Now, despite attempting to have that all in place for a launch sale at the very end of January, clearly that fell apart as the end of that month approached. Everything’s fallen behind (so far, so typical) but I’m still working on all these things and they should be done in February now, not January. Some of them are really close now.

News item #2 – Etsy activity’s slowed dramatically post-2023. That means I have more time to work on asset collections and new product creation (papercraft kits and more) for Etsy, work on website updates which is not trivial, there’s a ton of outdated stuff online and things which need overhauling, fixing. And then on top of all of that, a bit of video reworking for a relaunch of HornbostelVideos.com soon, and ongoing work on a list of game dev projects. So really about 20 broad efforts in progress, each with a list of usually a few dozen subtasks [give or take] like making a really good new textured 3d model start to finish, or processing a batch of texture maps in a subfolder, reworking a web page, etc… the sort of things that can take maybe 3-5 hours each to get done. There are something like 1200 of these tasks queued. In time terms, it’s easily a year or more of stuff to do even setting aside the unknowns like how many people will place print orders on Etsy – orders that finance other work but also add to the queue and delay everything else in terms of the timing. If Etsy sale activity slows, as it has slowed lately, that is the time to try to get some of those tasks in the queue churned through. And I’ve been doing just that, including the creation of a few new paintings to fill in Etsy shop categories which were a bit sparse. I made some relationship/romance themed art recently for the purpose of Valentine’s Day but now it’s too late for that stuff to be shipped to anyone by that day… nonetheless I’ll show you that now.

rings, roses, lace. acrylic painting on Etsy. 11×14 inches. All the artworks seen in this post are this size or smaller, and all are priced well below $20. Especially if on sale.

Two lovebirds forming a heart shape, with irises.

News item #3) I’m going to be keeping sale discounts fairly modest on the popular Etsy print service listings from now on – usually only 10-20% discounts, at most, with other items that nobody really ever buys, sometimes going to as low as 25, 30, 45% off, possibly 50% in very rare cases. We’ll note – custom bookmark designs, poster prints, the most typically purchased stuff that sold constantly in 2023, all those things are now about 12-18% more expensive than they were at the end of 2023. So even when on sale, they’ll never drop as low as they did during the Halloween 2023 sale.

That – massive discounts across the shop at the time of a holiday spike in activity – was a disastrous incident, and it won’t happen again. Not only will the products that sold TOO FAST for me to keep up with demand no longer be as cheap, but the sales that do occur will usually not coincide with big end-of-year holidays ever again. So if you want a thing relating to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday/Cyber Monday, Christmas or New Years… don’t expect any discounts at any of those times. Do expect occasional random sales to appear seemingly out of nowhere and disappear just as unexpectedly, at seemingly random points not tied to any major holidays. This will drive many people nuts but the hope is to even out activity year-round to whatever extent is possible. And not announcing the start or end widely? Helps smooth out buying activity. Part of why the prior sales went horribly was the massive awareness of the sale coming up, and its end day and a rapid surge of buyers all in a single day right before sale end. This sort of wildly uneven buyer activity concentrated in just a handful of days out of the entire year, meant that there were weeks of nothing happening, and weeks where I was so flooded with orders that many of those were severely, unacceptably delayed. I wound up refunding hundreds of dollars of orders and sending a massive volume of apology messages to worried, upset people. If you are following my social media accounts closely you might see a bit of info on imminent sales once in a while in one spot or another, but mostly it won’t be widely displayed. I will say this – there are going to be two sales on Etsy this month. One of them is pretty short, and it is just starting right about now. The other lasts a few days, and is later in February.

Again, the links I discussed:

https://matthornb.itch.io/

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

Halloween sale, a victim of its own success

WHAT HAPPENED:

The Halloween sale resulted in a huge surge of activity, even entirely unprecedented, by the time it ended [midnight, Oct. 31] with multiple new orders showing up every hour in the last six or seven hours of [Halloween] and that settled down a few days later, to a somewhat normal level of activity by Nov. 5-6. Even Nov. 1-4 though saw highly elevated levels of activity AFTER the sale had ended – anywhere from 6-10 orders placed daily on top of the nearly 20 orders on the final sale day itself.

I managed, in short, nearly a thousand dollars in transactions in ONE WEEK. Sounds great, right?

No. It was largely a cataclysmic disaster.

The reason why is simple: I cannot fulfill more than 4 or 5 large orders per day. The time in a day to do more than that simply isn’t there – I’ve spent about a hundred hours working on turning around orders since the morning of Oct. 31st to the morning of Nov. 9. Like every waking hour. Only now – on Nov. 9, have I finally caught up on shipments.

So… about 50 orders from Oct. 31 to Nov. 6. Most fell several days behind on shipment, some painfully more than that. I opted for a first in, first out fulfillment pattern for the most part. Which meant, in general, nearly all orders were shipped late, especially those that were in or near to, the end of Oct. 31 or Nov. 1 timeframe. Lots of those took about a week or so to ship. Way beyond the ‘3 business dyas’ claim that has typically applied on the shop in the past.

As a result: About a dozen orders fully refunded, another 20 or so saw shipping upgrades to make up for lost time.

I have actually lost a bit at this time in all, in the wake of a sale that was supposedly a dramatic success with $900+ in orders, and a hundred or so hours of work on my end. It comes out to around -$.0.39 in net gain per hour worked. It’s entirely unsustainable. The last ten days, fielding upset messages regarding delays, printing large batches of things and packing and shipping. And I was not making money doing any of this. I lost money on a ten day stretch during which this stress consumed the entire ten days.

Shipping was another issue. I had set up an account on Stamps.com, but had issues integrating it with Etsy which meant tracking I saw had to be copied to customers, but perhaps more significantly, not only did buyers not immediatly see shipment had occurred, Etsy itself as a platform failed to see the fact as well, so as a reuslt of both this – widespread shiping delays and issues – and gaps/lags in communication, among other difficulties keeping up, I have lost ‘Star Seller’ designation on Etsy moving forward. Which is deserved, I get it.

I tried, I worked my butt off the last ten days, but even so… maybe not enough. Should I have gone without sleep? Maybe. But that’s not sustainable. Will I get a pile of mixed or negative ratings in the next few days? Likely. I understand why. I tried to communicate but did not always do that often enough given the sheer volume of messages. I tried to turn all the orders around but again, just too many in too short a timeframe.

SO WHAT WILL HAPPEN NOW:

-I’ve adjusted pricing upward on bookmarks, at least… the bookmarks that allow customization to be requested from me. Simply put, there are buyers who request a lot of Photoshop editing and various design ideas be pursued, in various directions, on bookmark designs before they choose a design they like and that moves forward. That sort of order always is more time consuming for me than a simple customer who says, “I have a design already, that I made myself, can you print it on some bookmarks?” So the two types of situations are now being made two separate listings, and the more difficult of the two is roughly $8 more expensive in general. The bookmarks had exploded from a completely unknown listing four months ago to – as of the past month – 45% of sale activity. So adjusting even this one thing will solve a lot.

-Aside from that one price increase in one of the two parts of a product split, all items in general besides tyhe bookmarks are 4% more expensive from here on out – another slight incremental price increase along with others over the last few years. Pricing increases, broadly, aren’t meant to punish buyers, but they do filter out a few of those who aren’t serious and allow me to keep up with the buyers who remain after that.

-I’ll be reducing the discounts on Thanksgiving/Christmas sales to minimum. Sales during holidays are always crazy and the 30% off or more across the board over Halloween caused a deranged mass of acitivity, Plans now: small sales on holidays, bigger sales during otherwise slow stretches, and a word of advice to buyers in general, is please DO NOT WAIT TO THE FINAL HOUR OF THE FINAL DAY OF EVERY SALE! That happened with the Halloween sale, people who ordered during the first four or five days of it usually got their orders deliverd on time, those who waited to the end right before it was over, saw massive delays because EVERYONE was doing the exact same thing. Basically I’d like to even out orders over time. So… watch for the bigger sales to occur here and there in times of 2024 when nothing whatsoever seemingly justifies them. Like, the stretches where no holidays are present, might see surprise discounts of 30-45% on things. But don’t be shocked or whatever, when the Thanksgiving and Christmas sales end up having milder discounts of 10-20%. It’s all some sort of attempt on my part to even out patterns of purchasing activity over the long term.

TLDR: Only place orders during the Thanksgiving/Christmas sales if you want things before Christmas. If the item is not time-sensitive, consider waiting to early 2024 as there will be deepr discounts during otherwise slow spans then. Definitely DO not wait til the end of sale events either. You might get caught up in a nightmare of the “Halloween 2023′ sort where your item arrives a week later than is initially estimated. THIS WILL BE A RISK PRIOR TO CHRISTMAS!

I’M NOT GIVING UP ON ETSY but am definitely learning – the hard way! – from mistakes!

I’m really sorry to everybody who saw their packages delayed. I am. Some of them haven’t even reached the buyers yet even if they are one the way now as of this morning or some other point over the past few days.

Revised sale planning:

Nov. 10-14, Pre-Thanksgiving sale – 10-25% off most items.

Nov. 22-Dec. 6, Pre-Christmas sale, 10-15% off most items.

Jan. 1-10, New Year’s sale, 20-40% off most items.

AGAIN, HERE’s the ETSY LINK:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

Halloween Etsy sale active!

In acknowledgement of the fact that the October Halloween sale is going on, and that all Etsy items are temporarily 30+% off, I’ve updated the sale info page of this site accordingly:

Astonishing Etsy Bargains! (hornbostelproductions.com)

It seems to be a big deal somehow – 90 people, sometimes over a hundred, are showing up each day now that the sale’s begun. And yes, this sale event encompasses my birthday. I’m turning 37 this October. I’m getting old.

If you want this to be a good birthday for me, or a good Christmas for my family, or you just want to make me able to donate more to *actual* worthy causes, want to help with my launching of more completed projects (videos, video games, stock media packs, new print products, papercraft sets, whatever it is I’m doing or working on that’s going to make backing the shop worthwhile in your eyes, well, you can get some AWESOME discounts right now on a wide range of things you’ll love to have, while also helping me to further goals I care about and that will assist my family, friends, and the world.

MatthewLHornbostel – Etsy

Thanks so much, everyone!

Here are some greeting cards that are one of the many things on sale that’ve taken off suddenly like crazy despite the fact that I only released them very recently. These big, glossy greeting cards are currently a dollar each:

One dollar per card! Less for a three-pack! And I’ll include an envelope with any future cards in the mailer, a big one that can hold what is admittedly a larger than typical Christmas card.

Just released, nobody’s bought one yet, but these 6″ by 9″ sticker name tags (for trick or treaters) are on sale under $1 each. They can have whatever name[s] and text color you want, so easy stuff for tacking onto a candy container for people on the street to identify the name of your little ghost/goblin if that’s useful.

It astonishes me just how rapidly this listing took off. There are a dozen people with custom bookmarks in cart at the moment, on my Etsy shop. But not too hard to understand why. A lot of people want custom bookmarks and either have their own designs or want one put together. And at under $1 for a bookmark plus shipping, the current sale pricing on this listing is really hard to ignore. The prices even drop steadily from there as the number of copies rises, currently going under $0.40 per bookmark (!) with sufficient volume, during the sale.

Also, there’s a super-colorful preset batch of bookmarks, with my own archive of art paintings printed differently on front and back of eight. No customization but it’s under $1.50 during this sale – for a set of EIGHT of these art bookmarks.

The four above examples? They’re just a few of the 50+ active listings. Seriously, go look at the shop right now, it’s crazy how good the pricing is on everything for the rest of October 2023.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

A recently posted new painting. Acrylic on canvas. Mojave desert imaginary scene. On sale, 45% off. $15 + shipping.

The best ‘promotional boost’ package there, is now on sale at just $45. That bundle includes a shipment of 250 double-sided business cards with your design or a custom one built in Photoshop based on your input, hundreds of custom flyers, plus an online promotion to 75,000+ people via search and banner ads, from someone who actually has some experience in making that stuff work in finding people. I mean, you ran across my site, didn’t you? 😉

The stock media stuff has struggled out of the gate – there’s a scathing review of the video VFX pack which ultimately has been pulled off the shop to be redone completely at some point. The textures have some (far fewer, but some) issues as a collection too, but a HUGE update’s due to the collection within the next 20 days. An update that’s been in the works seemingly forever but… it involves over a hundred more materials and scattered enhancements to the first thousand textures in the collection which bring those up fully to modern standards. As PBR surfaces, they’ll just look better, which has to do with a ton of careful manual editing I’m doing, and some clever cutting-edge AI processes for upscaling and depth solving. As for the video (VFX) collection and that – the only negative review I have on my Etsy account out of 180+ total reviews… yeah, it’s true, many of those clips are pretty much unusable these days. Standard-def footage is useless to many video editors and is, as stated, blurry. Set aside the several ‘shaky’ clips that are not easily usable for that reason and the main issue is resolution/blurriness of the bulk of the material. You all, I spent a few hundred $ shooting all that stuff but much of it is years old. Like, in some cases, as old as 2011-2013. So yeah, the budget-range cameras of that era were not good enough to grab footage useful by modern standards. It’s why much of that stuff’s gone freeware at this point on https://matthornb.itch.io [the TACC2018 page] and I hope you don’t hold that older video material against me.

That said: I am working towards some modern 3d rendered physics-sim elements in 4k so hopefully when that is out it’ll make up for the flaws of the old stuff. Well, that and the texture and 3d asset pack updates inbound.

And I’m still working on a HornbostelVideos website update and it’s been slow in coming but I think I’ve got the design right this time. It’s a very tricky thing, setting up a video site that needs to not only hold close to a hundred videos with room to grow from there, but in a way that is intuitive to navigate AND has to be responsive, i.e it must read clearly even on a cheap phone screen that’s as little as 300-400 pixels wide. I’ve currently got the new design set up to look good on low res screens, medium res, and high res full-HD. I won’t advise you to watch on your phone, I’d prefer a good tablet or iPad or a desktop/laptop but people do watch stuff on phones and I have to be able to handle that!

News on numerous fronts will be posted here between now and the end of 2023. Keep an eye out for cool stuff. That’s all for now I guess.

Quick note – July 2023

Etsy July 4 sale is over.

But there are still deals to be had on my Etsy shop for those willing to place a larger order. Right now until end of July, the following rules apply shop wide:

10% off all orders over $20.

15% off all orders over $30.

Free shipping on all orders over $35 (this has been true for years and will remain true after July)

20% off all orders over $45.

25% off orders over $60

30% off orders over $75.

If you want to buy a ton of items – custom print orders of large scale, etc, this is a good opportunity to do so.

When this July opportunity is over, we’ll head into August and throughout August the deal shifts into a similarly experimental ‘flash deal mode’ – daily deals become the norm – with a random number generator picking five really random listings to discount by equally random amounts anywhere in the range from 5-55%. Every night at midnight the set of discounted listings will change. Could be fun and if you time it right it’s entirely possible you could nab a ridiculous deal on an item you want at some point that month!

Finally, early September is Labor Day sale time, and *everything* will be over 15% off. Exact numbers TBD but… certain listings that have gone nowhere for a long time will see drastic discounts of up to 70%. That is pretty nuts!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel – once again, here is the Etsy link.

Etsy shop is rebounding

Bouquets of paper flowers, in little mini pots. $4.49 each + shipping.

My Etsy shop was supposed to be leveling off and headed into the background, supposedly.

I raised pricing noticeably… to the extent that the shop is not only profitable but that margin is nearly doubled.

I also pretty much stopped promoting it with paid ad campaigns outside of Etsy.

Figured that would hold onto some of the existing, happy customer base, but not all of it, and limit the flow of new buyers, who in some cases are unpredictable, maybe difficult to deal with.

Well, what happened wasn’t a decline or a leveling off but a boom. The existing customers pretty much all kept ordering. And the new customers kept showing up despite my removal of ads leading into Etsy, but now the customers were arriving passively through Etsy itself at increasing rates. I realized that the reason was a temporary spike in the percentage of visitors who were buying, and apparently that metric spiking led Etsy as a platform to boost my listings and their visibility, including through the Etsy search ads you cannot opt out of. Beyond all this, my revenue has almost quadrupled, hitting $50-60/week in gains due to the pricing change, the lack of ad costs, and an uptick in buyers and to a lesser extent traffic generally. And… I’m just gonna roll with it now.

Yes, I’ve gotten a Cricut. Yes, I’m releasing a line of mini floral bouquets soon and they’ll start off at $4.49 each, then probably go up a bit once there are some reviews of them piled up. Most things on my Etsy are like that – the most underpriced stuff is almost always the stuff nobody is buying or reviewing yet.

I also have a ‘Greek architecture’ papercraft kit on the way, plus extension of all existing papercraft sets to O scale and T scale in about a month, and an upcoming option for precut kits at least with N, Z scale by June.

Yes, a few new paintings are being made. That’s not high priority but it’s still going on.

Yes, there was a Cinco De Mayo sale and everything was 15% off.

Yes, there’s a Mother’s Day sale coming up really soon (May 7-15) and everything will be at least 23% off throughout it. Some items are going to be over 30% off.

No, most sales in the future won’t have discounts quite that good.

Yes, I’m seeing 60 visitors daily on the shop lately. About half of them on any given day are probably new visitors.

Yes, I’ve had 75 people favorite the shop, up from 50 at the end of 2022.

And yes, I do have big plans elsewhere too. I’m working on some major stock media updates, for example, and a revised HornbostelVideos.com site design with a ton of additional video material, which goes live soon.

Thanks everybody, really excited about this actually and figure it’ll be a big deal in terms of overhauling and improving existing content and adding a lot of new things too.

One more note – an eBay auction is also going on, lots of action cameras in a bundle starting at $49 with no added shipping cost. Take a look here if interested.

Reopening Etsy physical shipments?

I am considering reopening Etsy printing services during Spring 2023 after all the moving is complete, ie by May 2023.

Some caveats:

-Minimal promotion of the Etsy shop. My aim is less to aggressively expand to new buyers who may or may not be happy with my work, and instead to focus on continuing fulfilling orders for the 50 or so repeat buyers who have generally been happy with what I’ve done and are usually easy to work with. These people have asked me to return and I’m genuinely considering doing so.

I spent *hundreds* promoting my Etsy in 2022 and many of the people who were drawn in were upset with the outcome for various often finicky reasons, demanded refunds. So by limiting active promotion, I not only expect to have a higher proportion of happy customers, and fewer upset one off people, but less promotional cost as well. This all makes the shop more likely consistently profitable and well regarded even if its rate of growth is limited, for 2023.

-Other notes, I still have a Greek papercraft kit in development, and several potential paintings. So the reopened physical items are not just shipped prints, BTW, they include the papercraft and handmade art as well – and better still, other new products that may surprise everyone. The copy paper will soon have a 13*19 option, a new cutting system for arbitrary sizes of prints will soon exist, there may even be a precut option for papercraft kits* pre scored with a Cricut!

Longer term, sizes above 13*19 are also possible. That will take a while to happen though. I do have plans to someday acquire a printer capable of printing up to 24″ by 48″, among other pretty cool things.

In other news: Yes, Vivid Minigolf is moving forward, yes it will be released by end of May 2023 barring a surprise huge setback. And while I am starting off with Steam, Itch.IO, Gamejolt… I may be adding the Epic Games Store to that list. Epic’s storefront is pretty huge, they’re making entry easier for indies now, and they only take 12% of sales, vs. 30% on Steam. So they will be a serious option to look at.

Prior to any of that: March 17, that’s six days from now, is St. Patrick’s Day, and on that day, just for 24 hrs, I’ll be doing another giant bundle sale through Itch.IO. Check that out here.

That is also when something new and cool might happen – that day may yet see:

-a patch and update to the furniture collection of 3d assets. (very likely, near certain)

-some new imagery relating to Vivid Minigolf (very likely)

-maybe even the launch, finally, of a Vivid Minigolf Steam Page? (somewhat likely)

That particular sale event could be really big for a few reasons. But mainly the fact that I’ve backed it with a $20 ad campaign and also some free link building efforts – posts on social media, YouTube comments, forum signatures, etc.

There’s also a little page on this site that’s seen a hundred views to date, focused on this exact sale event:

https://www.hornbostelproductions.com/sale/

So this could get interesting. I hope it goes well.

December 2022

A quick note on what looks to be the year’s final Etsy sale.

All printing services are going to be 25% off from Dec. 5 to Dec. 20.
Everything else is going to be 60% off. So, paintings, papercraft kits, stock media packs… all the things people normally don’t buy. Like for example, those three widely-ignored ‘3d level / app creation’ listings where I make a 3d environment based on someone’s rough sketched layout or batch of still photos? The ones where I agree to work for just over ten hours doing that, at a pay rate of under $3 per hour for my work in texturing and 3d and gamedev level design? Yeah, it is going down to just under a single dollar per hour of my time working. I am still pretty sure nobody will pay $10 for it, because if the public still hasn’t done anything with these listings by now they likely never will. Even the cheapest one, the gallery one that takes me 4 hrs. work to do, and goes on sale for $2 or $3 now and then… I don’t think anyone will ever buy it. Please SOMEBODY prove me wrong and demonstrate that you actually realize how insanely good that pricing is given the work involved!
I will post several new paintings on Etsy this month, They probably will sit there unpurchased for years. I know they’re kind of loose and impressionistic, I do get that, but at 60% off my paintings are about $1/hr pay for work involved on my part once materials are factored out. So again, ridiculous underpricing that nobody takes advantage of.
I am likely to attempt jumping into some niches that are already present on Etsy because every time I attempt selling a thing that’s truly unique and exceptional value nobody wants it. So for some reason that includes paper flower stuff (at max. $8 per mini bouquet) and pop up cards (gift tags) and so on. Still, being me I couldn’t help wanting to push each category closer to realism. So the petals and leaves of my paper flowers have photorealistic printed textures on the paper, and the gift tag pop ups are going to look unexpectedly richly detailed.
And a new niche that nobody has been messing with. 3d photos. I can take family photos and convert them into 3d extruded scenes using layer after layer of cut chipboard and printed photo material, to give the scene realistic depth. The depth extraction begins with AI depth map solver software and some common sense manual edits and refinements when needed, followed by a splitting of the grayscale map into roughly eight tonal sections, each with the corresponding portion of the photo separated using that depth mask. Then several hours printing, cutting, layering it all in a box. I will likely price each photo at about $8. You know the drill though, it is a thing nobody online will really ever realize is available, nobody understands it, probably nobody will ever buy it. That’s how this goes!
Yes, I am going to add more papercraft kits soon, starting with a Coastal Greek kit. Think ‘Santorini’ plus a few modular ruins and you get the idea. Granted, papercraft kits have sold but my most profitable one to date has never actually turned a profit, it always costs more to promote it than the sales that result.
Anything earned this December sale will be focused on setting up Christmas gifts for young children, family members that at this time I have no idea how to cover gifts for.
Family and friends and scattered acquaintances in fairly large numbers may all be gifted something truly odd this year beyond typical gift items. As in: 80 or 85 % off coupons, one use only, applicable to any item on my Etsy shop ASIDE from the printing services. If that works out it could trigger a batch of sales in Jan. 2023 and perhaps some subsequent reviews, resulting in momentum finally (I hope?) for the sort of items that thousands look at, hundreds favorite, and nobody actually ever buys. Because – sometimes – the only path to getting something moving is when the price is dropped to the $1 range or lower.

I still only have six listings which are typically profitable. Six of the 50+ listings are what keep the shop viable at all. You might think with Star Seller and 275+ sales it is going well but it has the potential to expand and become popular far more broadly in 2023. And if that starts soon, it helps in other ways too. I would *love* to net $750 in sales this December to cap off the year. It would result in $200-250 in pay which would be enough not just to make the holidays better for the nephews and niece, but beyond that could push things to a stable enough start in ’23 that maybe, just maybe, you will find all those long delayed gamedev things completed and launched on Steam earlier than you now expect.

This is not over yet… indeed, I get the sense it has all barely started.

Vivid Minigolf moving forward

More news and an updated site design will arrive soon, but for now just know that the project is making massive progress.

Main menu – Vivid Minigolf free version, feature limited [WIP]

Vivid Minigolf – first hole of the first [flower garden] course in the free demo.

In other news: The Etsy Labor Day sale is active. (Until the end of Sept. 10)

Everything 15+% off, some items up to 50% off!
Over 100 reviews of the shop now
Over 210 sales have been made to date
$2 of every $10 in sales go to worthwhile charitable causes during this sale in particular.
Anything somehow earned [despite] discounts and donations, will help get Vivid Minigolf launched successfully before the end of November 2022.

There’s also a sale on matthornb.itch.io if you’d prefer that.

March 2022 update

Right now, my Etsy shop is facing a mess. There are so many people who have placed orders the last month that it reached a point where I was entirely unable to keep up.

The result? Many orders delayed and often partially or fully refunded as apology. By Mar. 20, 2022, the shop was closed, ‘on vacation’ and my message saying why was fairly blunt. It was mostly due to the overwhelming surge of sales that had finally hit a tipping point – I could not keep up even with repeated all nighters. The stress, sleep loss, etc, causing tears coming and going in waves and eventually, at a certain point, thoughts about suicide.

So the shop got shut down for a temporary span, which let me scramble to wrap up all the backlogged and often very delayed orders. When will this Etsy shop reopen? Maybe mid April roughly. The refunds to impatient buyers have erased all gains for March 2022. Hundreds of hours of effort and nothing earned, a pretty typical fail for me really historically. When the shop reopens, it will have prices that are typically 10-15% higher. That may make it sustainable, for a while longer, maybe. But the pricing has been increased 2-3% a month each month since November and still every month has more customers place orders there than the month before. 2022, the three months of madness so far, saw more sales on Etsy than the six preceding years of sales combined.

I will not meaningfully discount or set sales there again for some time.

Itch.Io, however, will be seeing a deep sale for Easter 2022. I hope that it goes well, certainly I have indications that itch is the next Etsy for me finally, just as Etsy promised to be my ‘next eBay’.

It is a recurring pattern, where I promote a shop and its stellar array of unique, labor intensive, and insanely underpriced products incessantly for years and have tens of thousands of visitors and not one buys a damn thing until at some point one person does and reviews what was purchased. Then another, then another. With rising frequency and fervor, this escalates extremely rapidly. I start steadily raising prices and it still continues exploding exponentially. At some point I become swamped and maybe, even have to shut the shop down or at least most of the listings to save my sanity, any shred of it still there.

I think eBay hit that crisis point at least a little slowly. Etsy it happened faster.

I have 410 positive ratings on eBay, 74 positive now on Etsy. Two now on itch.io. No negative reviews anywhere on any of the shops I have run, aside from a single bad rating that changed following a full refund and apology.

eBay crashed and burned in early 2020, Etsy may still fall apart this year…

Itch hasn’t even exploded much quite yet. But it may very soon now that the first couple ratings are there, because usually on my shops that’s when things start escalating faster and faster. Some of you should seriously grab that stuff while the entire contents of the shop are on sale, all bundled for a single dollar, before I am possibly forced to begin raising the prices like what I did on Etsy… and eBay before that. Just pointing this out…

Visit the itch shop maybe during the next (Easter – April 14-17, 2022) sale when it is all still hitting over 90+% off discounts. There is an amazing bundle arriving soon.

https://itch.io/s/68881/easter-2022-80-off-everything