GitHub offer for students

This might be interesting for the students of you all:

https://github.com/blog/1900-the-best-developer-tools-now-free-for-students

Interesting enough it includes UE4 without the need to pay $19 per month. Wish Unity would offer something similar.

 

I bet some troll will point out unity free and pretend it's enough.

 

If it were truly enough, they wouldn't be selling watermarked non-commercial student copies. I don't see why they can't give those away to students.

If a student then desires to sell a game that uses Pro features, they can simply buy Pro. Otherwise they can downgrade to Free and sell with that.

 

Well, the students from today might have good positions in the industry tomorrow. That's why companies like Microsoft give away almost everything to students for free. TBH students usually have these tools "free" anyway.

So giving students UE4 for free is a pretty smart move as the future decision takers and makers might force their employees to use the tool they already know, which would be UE4 in that case and NOT Unity.

 

I don't mean to kick up this 'debate' but Unity Free is enough to make and ship a game.

 

Is it sufficient for a student though? I won't claim to know the state of most courses since it has been quite some time since I looked over different universities, but I do know at least one friend of mine is taking game development and his course specifically uses Unity Pro. His university expects their students to have it.

I simply think it would be nice if Unity offered their watermarked non-commercial Pro licenses for free to students.

 

It's only like $160 like people should be able to put that down for the whole Unity suite.

 

It would appear Autodesk and Epic disagree with this viewpoint. Between the two of them we don't even need Unity to learn game development anymore.

Also while $160 may not be expensive for some people, it isn't that way for everyone. I'm not a student anymore, but after rent and utilities are paid I have less than $200 for an entire month to get by.

 

You never needed any of those to learn game development. There are a hell of a lot of game developers out there using things other than unity and unreal. And people have been learning game programming long before unreal or unity came along. I never even heard of Unity until last winter. It's only been around for 4 or 5 years, hasn't it?

 

No, but you know what I mean. I'm not talking about building your game from scratch. Some companies may do that but the majority will be using an engine. Whether it was made third party or in house doesn't really matter.

 

They are talking about offering to students. How many students actually own a legitimate company? Let alone have the money to even register one and all that goes with it.
So yes unity free is fine for the college students to make and publish a game.
And please don't turn this into yet another unity vs ue4 thread and pricing.

 

You miss the point ideed. Students from today are the bosses from tomorrow who decide about the tools to use in companies.

 

And most of the stuff you learn in college are not necessarily useful in the real world.
Companies like to teach you how they do things and the tools they use.

 

I got a job straight out of University at Unity with all my portfolio being made up of XNA and Unity free projects.

We offer great student pricing such as non-commercial Unity Pro (+ android & ios pro) for £99: http://www.studica.com/uk/en/unity/unity-pro-5-game-development-student-license/u5pro-2014-cs.html

Check out this link of awesome games made with Unity free.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/can-you-name-some-games-made-with-the-free-version-of-unity.258766/

 

It isn't great pricing for students when the competition is free.

 

I started as a game artist in 1997 and have worked in various small devs over the years. More recently I do freelance 3D work for games and advertising and so on. During term time I also teach on a games art university course in the South of England, a three year degree course (Bachelor of Arts).

The course has been running for 11 years now and I've been teaching part time on it on and off for those 11 years. Getting the students to experience a full concept-to-game-ready art pipeline is crucial and the course has offered several ways to experience that over the years. A year ago UDK was king, and Unity Free was also used by some, with an adventurous few trying out CryEngine.

I'm only an associate part-timer, so I'm not au fait with the exact situation, but there seemed to be something odd about the legal-ese of teaching Unity. Basically we weren't allowed to instruct the students in Unity unless licenses were bought by the Uni, I think. Because there was no issue with UDK it got used by most students. It had the path of least resistance for students and staff.
I have a Unity Pro license and so I was glad to hear that the course leader was planning to get the Uni to invest (finally) in some licenses for the lab over the summer, ready for this teaching year. The bureaucracy and hassle involved to coerce the purse-holders to sign on the dotted line is like pulling teeth so this was no small deal. That's the university's fault, not Unity, but still a legal and financial barrier.
Then E3 happened.
Now there are no Unity licenses for the lab.
The path of least resistance wins.

 

Gargh; Unity threads are proof of Godwins law with Nazis swapped out with UE4s pricing.

 

It doesn't necessarily have to be UE4 to point out the failings in Unity's student pricing. I simply am not aware of any other game engines that are free and used in commercial settings.

As it stands there are a lot of free tools for students to learn with. Unreal 4 is free certainly, but so are Autodesk's plethora of tools and Visual Studio Express isn't missing much. Those make up a good chunk of the commercial tools.

Unity had great pricing back when there was no real competition, but the same could be said for a lot of companies.

 

They have to get there first. If Unity is today's tool, that's what they will use today. If UE4 is the tool du jour...well, you get the idea.

And, as others have pointed out elsewhere - Unity and UE4 are better-suited for different things. Choose the tool that fits the situation. Unity rocks in the mobile space at the moment. UE4 is recognized as being superior on high-end PC works.

Of course, anyone who lacks the knowledge of A) how to use the tool properly, or B) proper knowledge period, can create something crappy. No engine can protect you from making a crappy game.

And, don't be an astroturfer for either side. It makes you, and the game engine you're knighting for, look bad, whatever your stance. Let's be above that sort of douchebaggery.

 

Forget the UE4 bit, the GitHub Micro account alone is deal enough I'm luckily (unfortunately) still a student (albeit of the hyper-saiyan senior variety) at this point, so between that and some of the cloud services, I am one happy camper