Bachelor degree with Unity free license

Hello everyone

I am far beyond middle of my semester and Bachelor assignment. My teacher with who I'm consulting this assignment, send me an email today in which he state that due to license changes I'm no longer allowed to use Unity free to complete my Bachelor assignment. Can some of you guys confirm this license changes or it is some misunderstanding.

Sorry for my English I'm not from English speaking country.
Thanks

 

Educational establishments are not able to use Unity Free, but students should be able to use Unity Free on their own devices. If the assignment is your work done on your devices, it should be OK.

Hopefully a member of the Unity staff will answer here to give an official answer, although you might have to contact Unity yourself. If you do get an answer, please reply here with what you found out.

 

This explains why my college just uninstalled unity from every computer on campus.

 

Now you simply need to go to them and point out how Unreal 4 is free for colleges and universities. Students can get it for free too. If UE4 gets enough attention for it maybe Unity will change their policy.

https://www.unrealengine.com/education

 

Wow, this sounds crazy for me, almost software companies have free educational licenses because students are potential future users and customers of a tool and if we are talking of a free app how as Unity free I not understand nothing.

 

ORLY? I can give them my NJIT student info and get a free license? I wish I knew this a couple years ago. I'm graduating in May xD

Well, I guess I'll be trying out leadwerks, UE4 AND leadwerks this summer.

Much apologies. /thread?

@Ryiah

You can tell how much they despise the competitors by this thread being an issue, but not some of the other threads that have spiraled out of control, grown to 40+ pages and are so far off topic it's hard to believe they're the same

 

I didn't see the point of repeating what was already stated very plainly. If you felt it was adequately answered you could have closed the thread. These types of questions tend to tangent into these types of discussions.

I believe the instructor has to be the one to request the licenses through the official site. You might be able to do so yourself through the GitHub page it references though.

https://education.github.com/pack

 

Personally I prefer it when someone has additional questions that they open additional threads. At least for questions that aren't exactly on the same topic. I typically stop reading most threads once the initial question is answered.

 

That must be a big doubt, given the species involved is human.

 

Oh no.
Read title. Thought would get a bachelor for downloading Unity free. Disappointed.

Jokes aside:
@PavolM: can't you talk to your adviser? The school cannot have it installed on its machines. But you can clearly use it. So ask if you can finish it on a private machine and he looks at it on his private machine?

Students can register themselves, no teacher needed. Register for the github student developer pack:

 

Sweet. Thanks for the info

 

Interesting topic giving software licences away for free (to educational places)..

Unreal are playing it smart if thats what they do. Nothing better than training ppl to use your software so that's what they choose when they finish studying.

 

See that's when I find the interesting stuff begins.

I think it's smarter not to just give your product away left and right. If that's what UE wants to do, o.k. Schools buy office software. What is the difference?

Two products can't just keep competing for the same thing, forever, though. Let UE become branded as the engine that they have to give away. XD

 

Microsoft has little to no meaningful competition for their Office suite. Yes, we have Open Office and Libre Office. We also apparently still have Word Perfect being released. I thought that thing had died off years ago. Regardless if you go to work for a company, corporations especially, how likely are you to encounter one of the alternative Office suites?

Unity 5 and Unreal 4 though actually stand a good chance of competing with each other and going with one over the other is not a simple case of one being better than the other.

 

I don't use the free ones, cause they suck. In the end whoever can charge more for their product will end up being the big winner.

Right now I'm not sure how to evaluate the value of Unity and I haven't used UE.

 

So you have 1 customer for 1000$ and I have 1000 for 100$. You think you won?

 

Sounds like both are losers. You need consistent sales over time to run a business.

 

It doesn't make sense though for the educational aspect. If you get people started using a specific product, they'll generally tend to stick with that product.

Universities have been teaching Unity for a few reasons with one of them being how powerful it is for the price tag. It used to be pretty much alone in this aspect. Now though we have Unreal 4 with pretty much the same advantage only it is completely free.

Granted part of why Epic doesn't care about giving it away is that they don't make money from the upfront licensing cost but from royalties.

 

"they'll generally tend to stick with that product"

People are trendy, sometimes they just use what's hip. Branding is more important than anything else. Giving away your product seems like a good way to get your foot in the door, but more often it goes... cool, this is free. Let's switch to this. Later on, you try to charge and then people go... ugh, might as well go back to what we were using, we liked xyz better anyway.

*unless by "product" you mean blue rock candy

 

As students we got Visual Studio Ultimate, SQL Server, IBM DB2, Windows and much domain specific software for free.

It is a good business case: what students use they bring into the companies. Companies use what they can find enough people with experience for.
Companies that do that win.

These are the starting numbers. Each of our companies grow 100% per year. You still lose.

 

Big difference giving away a student version of your product if you're the only product. Is UE the only game engine on the market?

 

We're not talking about giving away commercial licenses though. We're talking about educational licenses which would naturally be non-commercial and quite likely watermarked.

 

Still, I'd rather sell my product than bank on the hope that people will buy it because they're used to it. I mean, how many machines do you expect to install this on that aren't already running it? Where is this huge, untapped market of developers that have never heard of Unity?

 

Interesting thing about people being trendy is that it doesn't matter if they decide to switch engines after investing in Unity Pro because Unity will have already made their income. Unreal 4 depends on royalties meaning if people stop using their engine after they buy it they lose.

Epic thus wants people to use their engine and stick with it. This is why they're giving it away to educational institutes. I wouldn't be surprised if they later removed the subscription fee altogether.

 

UE4 student is the normal license, you just save the 19$/m. But you pay the 5% on winnings.

If you have no competition the need to do that is much smaller. But students would pirate it anyway if it is above 50$.
(Ask my Matlab and Mathematica DVDs)

Many schools move away from Unity atm because UE4 is free for them and each Unity install costs money. It will take some time till Unity feels that, but they will feel that for sure. And mostly not because of the missing license payments from schools. But because finished students don't pay licenses, and some companies switch because more UE4 trained people are available.

 

I know UE4 is the normal license, but I'm talking more about the upfront costs and the Unity Pro license I'm pretty certain is not a commercial license. I may be wrong though.

 

I don't know I'm pretty sure Unity makes a lot of money off the asset store, which relies on a larger user base.. not just number of licenses sold. There's more to it than just sales, it's about broadening the base and including, in that base, serious developers not just amateurs...

 

They've stated in the past that they do not. It primarily exists to bring in developers, not bring in a meaningful income.

 

Ultimately the two tools are being marketed the two entirely different groups of people in my opinion. A 19 year old guy that just wants to make a first person shooter should definitely go with unreal, someone who plans to make a career out of being a game developer for multiple platforms should probably invest in unity.

 

Weird, but o.k.

 

Yes, which is totally why we don't get all the wannabe MMORPG developers.

 

Its sort of similar to the f2p model... granted it gets you no money, but if it puts your game in front of a wider audience. I would rather have 1000 free downloads than 10 paid downloads.

 

Your mean to tell me that they don't exist on unreal engines forums.

Those people post the same question as a post on C++ programming help forums, those people post that question on video game fan sites and YouTube video comments.

It's probably one of the most googled things in existence "how to make my own MMORPG?"

 

I haven't prodded the UE forums lately, but there weren't that many when I last checked. It was amusing how many faces I recognized over there that normally browse these forums though.

 

Well I just watched an episode of South Park last night and I learned something, most of the sales on free to play games come from users who get addicted. So unless people are getting addicted to game development, apples and oranges

 

Hard to get ppl addicted when there are only 10 of them

 

I don't really care what unreal has to offer I'm already invested in unity, my goal is to make my damn games and bothering with other engines only takes me further from that goal.

Last time I opened up the Unreal Engine I'm pretty sure it started me off with the default first person game, like literally it's just a first person shooter by default has that changed?

 

Well there's a lot more than 10 people using Unity and they have the nerve to charge for their product...

 

I have not seen a single such thread there. Maybe the mods remove them or such posters are scared to post there.

Joke is, they would get much farther there. Open ShooterGame template, voila, fully networked FPS done. Play with the blueprints to add more weapons and change the models, no single line of code => wohaaa, loook at my MMOFPS, me gonna destroy Blizzard!!!111

Maybe in UE3. But UE4 is general purpose. You can create an empty game. Or start with one of the templates, like ShooterGame for FPS. With empty you have much more work of course.

 

He may not have won. There are pros and cons to both sides of course. If he loses that 1 customer then he has nothing. Whereas if you lose 1 customer you still have 999. But I would certainly prefer to support the 1 customer who paid $1000 over supporting the 1,000 customers who each paid $1.

Oops I misread. Not sure what you are actually comparing. Of course, if you have 1000 customers each paying $100 you are ahead of him. But this seems like comparing two completely different things.

 

Based on what you're telling me Unreal Engine is perfect.

 

Use the tool that fits the job. UE4 needs a lot of horse power. But if you target horse power it is awesome.

Loook at my MMOFPS, me gonna destroy Blizzard!!!111
I created it in 20 minutes (including 18 minutes to download Shootergame).

 

Meanwhile, back in reality...

Go buy a Ferrari then put $120 tires from Walmart on it.

 

Having a series of videos discussing how to get networked gameplay with the engine running as a dedicated server certainly is helpful.

 

Look at their showcase and WIP forums. You wouldn't believe what single guys, small teams or a group of students do with it in some days or weeks.
http://krzysztofteper.com/korath.html

School project, 7 weeks:

 

...graphics + networking = game???

All this time, I've been blind.

 

There are also the subscription customers who keep paying as long as they're using Unity. And people who pay to upgrade to new versions.