How is Unity making money?

I'm saving my pennies to buy Unity plus its IOS and Android exporters, but people in IRC say that's not necessary, I could just release it using the free version.

I mentioned how that means Unity reserves the right to put advertising in my app, and make my users fill out a survey before they play the game, and I was hoping to avoid that. They said that the advertising consists of a little 'Made by Unity' blurb that pops out at game startup, and that the survey is auto-gathered statistics.

Are those truly the only disadvantages of not buying it? I hadn't even considered NOT buying it before, but now, I don't know.

Why is Unity free? It's such a great product, I don't want to run the company into the ground by NOT buying the product. I'm just not seeing the monetization here.

 

Source licenses, premium support and their new focus on services (like Unity Ads, Multiplayer Cloud etc..).

 

Please read the forums. There's tons of discussions about it.

In short: It's not an ad - it's a splash screen that you can still enable if you own the pro verison. It's nothing your users fill out - it's editor usage statistics you can also still enable in the pro version.
You HAVE to buy Pro for every plattform you release on (and everybody in your company) if your annual turnover exceeds 100.000$. You also get the dark UI in Pro only plus all the services mentioned in the comparison chart here: http://unity3d.com/get-unity

So - yes. If you can live with a splash screen and have less than 100.000$/turnover per year you can use the free edition.

How Unity makes money - from all the Pro customers and every service around the main program e.g. Asset Store, CloudBuild etc.

 

Plus there have been a few triple A companies that have released products with their engine. In some of those cases, a company may lease or buy a very specific type of license which may offer access to the source code or more specific requirements implemented by Unity for their needs compared to what us indies and most others get.

This is similar to some companies who pay Microsoft a million a year to keep supporting Windows XP just for them.

 

Dr Charles (PhD) prints money from the future for them.

 

And i suspect that another way for them making money is when a unity game is installed on a device and collects ¨what they call basic¨ information they later on sell that info to others.Something like what phone companies do.Personal info from ones phone is worth money to others too.Somehow is legal for them to do so but if im wrong i return back every word i said.

I just hope that John Riccitiello salary is not real (compared to what wikipedia say )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Riccitiello
XD

 

Ya like Wikipedia is always true.....
Don't always believe what you read.

 

This make my day.

 

There are other, less obvious effects of a free engine too. Its great for PR. It means that every kid who is vaguely into game development tries Unity. It means every educational institute doing game development teaches Unity. All of these factors combine together to make Unity the engine of choice for the future. After all, its far easier for a studio to bring a new employee up to speed on software they have already been using since they were 12 years old.

 

The truth is that Unity uses special mind control software to make you wire money to them directly. And then it wipes your memory of doing that. So if you don't remember wiring money to Unity, that proves what I said is true!

--Eric

 

Unity makes there money selling hats on team fortress 2.

 

The only situation where it is truly necessary to buy Unity Pro is if you're making over $100,000 annual gross revenue.

 

Or you feel that supporting Unity and having a Pro subscription is the right thing to do

This software has become such a big part of my life, i would feel guilty if I wasn't paying for it lol.

 

Actually I like having Access to the Alpha and Beta releases the Pro Subscription offers as well. For example the currently tested public alpha of the new 2D features is all sorts of awesome already (albeit alpha version buggy, of course)!
Level 11 and a few of the other features are a plus, too. I'm not even close to the 100k turnover but I still like having the Pro benefits.