The game I’m talking about here is my mobile game called “Ball’s Journey: Into Space” which I released on the Google Play Store in July of 2021. Unfortunately, as all good things come to an end, my game is no longer available on the Google Play Store and I will briefly explain why.

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This year Google Play Console changed its policy so that the personal data of developers that earn money from their games will be publically available, visible to everyone that scrolled a bit down on the game’s front page. Personal data meaning: my name, surname, current address, the town I live in and my personal phone number.

I obviously did not want that data to be publically visible so I wanted to disable any features related to monetization/ads both on the Google Play Store and the Unity Dashboard since the game has not generated a single penny in the last 2 years and I earned absolutely no money from it ever since the release of it. Turns out that once a developer releases a game that can earn any money at all either by ads or in-app-purchases (which it didn’t have) it cannot be changed without creating a new developer account.

That’s the moment I realized the best option was to completely remove Ball’s Journey from the Play Store and not worry about it ever again. And here it is now - with no ads and all google play features such as achievements and leaderboards removed.

What even is this game?

For the people that have never seen my game before, Ball’s Journey was a really simple game I developed during the summer vacations of 2021. Initially it was intended to be only a short project made only for learning purposes - not for publishing it - as I started my ongoing journey with programming just a year before, during 2020.

However, I guess one day I got an idea of actually finishing it and releasing my very own game. I’ve worked on it for many hours a day trying to make it as good as possibly it could be. Back then it was my magnum opus, looking at it now I treated it a bit too seriously but I absolutely do not regret working on it. I learned a lot of things both in terms of coding and designing any software in general. Also got to chat with many helpful people, and got some pretty interesting offers which made me sure that programming is a really viable career path 🤭