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If Unity needs their logo at the beginning of your game they should pay you.
I could not say better.

 

This discussion has clearly taken a turn for the absolutely bizarre. So they should pay you to use free software?

Perhaps you should set up a subscription and Unity pays you $125 a month?

 

That's twisting what was said. Free was not the context but paying for Plus.

 

Everything she said about Unity's new pricing is valid.

 

The maths is still a bit off. UE4 developers do not pay royalties on the first $3000 per game per quarter.

 

this is truth.. since they've combined the iOS and Android fees into the Pro fee (total would be 4500$), they are now requiring (as a subscription) $3000 (2 years).

I'm sure the way Unity looks at this as if.. "Hey, we're giving you a 33% discount". But in reality, no. Only if I had been a previous subscriber of Pro + iOS + Android. Otherwise, you're costs have significantly increased.

And "that" is the point of contention.

 

The only people getting a discount are the mobile Pro developers who were already on the previous subscription plan. (was $225/month; now $125/month) Everybody who had purchased a perpetual license including mobile Pro developers is getting hit with a price increase.

Remember, the upgrades for perpetual licenses were half the price of the original license. While Pro+iOS+Android was $4500 up front, the cost to upgrade it was only $2250 per major upgrade cycle (was 3-4 years; now 2 years). With the new subscription plan of $1500/year, those mobile Pro developers would have to pay $3000 for two years to keep updates instead of the previous $2250. That is a 33% price increase for that group.

 

I decided to double check your math. If you make $100,000 per year, you would owe Epic $4,400 (not $5,000). If you make $250,000 per year, you would owe $11,900 (not $12,500). That is of course assuming the revenue is generated evenly throughout the year. UE4 developers do not pay royalties on the first $3000 per game per quarter.

 

I don't know why people think Unreal is cheaper as it is...

True, I don't know why people think Unreal is cheaper as it is... anyone who knows anything about sales knows that anyone who takes a % cut from a product's sales actually has a chance for a better profit than someone who receives a single payment, as the more a product is successful, the more they get. That is, unless, you are expecting your game to sell very, very little, which is a bad omen from the start...

Anyway, the moment I saw Unreal's % cut, was the last I saw of unreal. That along with the fact that Unreal is Deferred only, which creates such a big barrier in terms of audiences, were the deal breakers for me. Unity is way better, so much more accessible not only in pricing, but in usability and its community.

 

It's not about "is it cheaper" it's about "is it cheaper when I have no money?" and in this case, feature for feature it is a superior option. Unreal becomes expensive when you can afford it. So does Unity, but everything in between seems to be the bone of contention.

I think what a lot of people quick to switch forget is, that engines aren't all suited to the same purpose. If you get results on Unity, it's probably worth sucking up and taking the splash. If you get results in UE4 then it's necessary to use UE4. Each engine is more than just a price choice.

 

Some people do seem eager to disqualify an engine solely on the cost of the license without determining how much time the engine may save them compared to another engine. How many millions of dollars will that company have to make before the royalties for the engine equal the cost of spending those additional man hours?

That isn't even taking into consideration that Epic is open to negotiating a custom license that may greatly reduced those royalties if not outright eliminate them in exchange for an upfront sum.

 

Can you clarify your thought on this?.. I'm not really understand what you mean by " it is a superior option"...

 

Hey guys, great discussions all around here.

As per my video podcast that was shared in this thread, I want to thank you for the feedback provided as I want to do everything I can to make sure this podcast is useful to the community.

A few points I would like to clarify, I like Unity, in fact I think Unity is a better engine than unreal for certains tasks. One of which is for creating mobile-first-platform games. The Unity Asset Store is also a much more mature storefront than the Unreal Marketplace, heck Unreal's doesn't even have a wishlist feature or proper search tools yet. (though they are constantly working on improving) The point is that both engines are great and either can be used to make a successful game.

For those that misunderstood I'd like to re-iterate that the 5% Epic takes is only AFTER the first $3,000 dollars per quarter. Not that mistaking the numbers invalidates any argument, just want to make sure everyone knows the full facts.

As far as open source goes, it is true that CryTek is in a bad position right now and probably isn't a fair comparison to Unity or Unreal. However I still do believe that when it comes to a tool like a game engine it absolutely should be open source so that those with capability can make necessary changes themselves. It also allows the process to be completely transparent and audited by the users who are technical enough to do so. This is more of a philosophical point I suppose.

I find open source valuable, I donate money to open source projects, but I understand that is not everyone's priority.

I think it is better for everyone, Unity users or Unreal users, if this sort of discussion let's the users voices be heard as that is the only way that these companies are going to know to make the proper user friendly decisions and I look forward to seeing future updates from UT on this topic.

 

Yeh it's nice and comes free with a Maya LT subs, but doesn't have a Mac client editor so rules it out for me.

 

I can only really talk about PC / Console / Mac / Linux because that's all I really do.

OK UE4:

I've been using Unreal and Unity for years now, 3D is UE's bread and butter. It's feature heavy, it's technically excellent and robust with tons of frameworks to help streamline the process which makes it extremely efficient when building games of any scale or size (in 3D of course). You can skip the frameworks and do whatever you want (like Unity), but it can give you a major leg up. Recently it got a whole load better, UE is now VERY fast and performant..

I have to make a special mention of the content examples released by Epic, the sheer amount of quality demo's and guides you can reverse engineer is fantastic. All the way from small games to AAA demo's showing you how it's really done.

UE's downsides: It's clunky, if you want to do something off the wall or extremely complex it can be a little bit like a black box. It can be overwhelming to new users and stuff like 2D seems not be a priority.. Although the difficulty is linear, at some point Unity can far surpass UE's difficulty. Epic doesn't really care about backwards compatability, they've only just recently (over the last six months or so) started to stagger development and do patch / stability releases instead of implementing a platitude of new features that would break a project when upgrading.

I love UE from a technical / game creation standpoint, I think it's a technical marvel and it's systems work exactly how I expect them to with little fuss and a lot of times far less effort. Although I wouldn't necessarily say I love working with it.

Unity:

Is the jack of all trades master of none (I mean that in a good way), if you want to have fun making a simple game of near enough any type across near enough any platform Unity rocks!.. It has some pretty damn cool middleware (I'd beg for middleware like Umbra in UE), it's code architecture is simple and refreshingly easy to understand.. It's logical, the UI is clean and it gives you enough out the box to put something together quickly with a smile on your face. It's import pipeline is excellent and it doesn't require stringent art workflows.

It has some of the best training video's / documentation I've ever seen, it has years of accumulated knowledge available from other indies and UE's asset store simply doesn't compare. No matter how many additional tools Unreal gives you, I can guarantee the Unity asset store can cover most of the gaps (bit strange for an "open source" engine huh?).

It's downsides: Implementation of quite a few core systems aren't as robust as UE and seems a little "hacky" at times, it suffers a few issues that shouldn't really be issues. It lacks some basic 3D features all other large modern engines have and some 3D systems are seriously out of date plus they are very slow to implement new features.. It's not as scalable as UE and it can take you far more time to implement systems / subsystems (if you can) than it would be just to learn UE, there's too much reliance on the asset store to fill the gaps. Also the closed nature of the engine may cause support issues without a decent support contract..

I love Unity's approach to game design, a mostly WYSIWYG approach where everything happens in near enough realtime. It's a pretty fast workflow tool up to a point and it's fun, I've always found Unity fun to use and I can't really say that about any other engine out of the platitude I've used.

It all comes down to what YOU want out of it, for a simple(ish) top down game I won't deny it I'd choose Unity any day over UE and suck it up for a support contract. For a more modern third / first person game like I'm doing, I'd actively avoid Unity.

 

Consider it this way: "All you have to do to use our $125 a month software for free is show our splash screen at the start."

Honestly, I can't understand people thinking they've got a leg to stand on when complaining about what's in the free version of the software.

 

Edit: Actually, I misread when I posted this, so I've quite possibly misinterpreted what hippo was saying. I'm going to leave it here, though, as I still think the rest of what I said is useful.

By "it" he's talking about whichever engine is best suited to your team / project / unique circumstances. There is no clear cut answer as to what engine is "better", there's a huge number of variables that play into that, and you should take them all into account when picking an engine for a project.

Also note that... you should pick engines for projects, not for people. Prior experience is indeed one of the many variable factors, and if you've a team with extensive prior experience with Tool X then that's a huge point in Tool X's favour... but that shouldn't mean that other factors are ignored.

 

Damn! Yeah. Of couse. 100 vs 4 should have tipped me off.
The rest remains valid, though. Yes.

Thanks for pointing it out.

 

1500$ for one license. This includes all plattforms (plus a few services) and is thus more in the 4500$ license cost tier.
Which makes 1500$/year or a complete 3 year cycle. Or if you want to think in upgrade prices: 1.5 year cycle for a complete version upgrade. But with no revenue cap, all plattforms, services and you only have to buy >100k. AND you get new features when they are ready.
Also no more whining about "I halted my game for the feature and now it's in the next release. You let us down Unity!"

It is slightly increased, yes. Not "a lot". And also only if you don't need the services.

 

That's simply not the case for everyone. Anyone on upgrade pricing and only targeting one platform are getting a huge price hike, especially if their one platform was neither iOS nor Android.

Edit: The comparison rate there is $750 for a desktop-only upgrade from a prior version, over 24 months is $31.25 a month. Even the initial purchase rate would have only come to $62.50 a month spread over the same period.

 

Yeah. Actually I just wanted to edit that in my original post just as you answered. The choice isn't there any more. And that is the important part.

It certainly looks like I am all for the new leasing system with the way I am arguing. Which strangely enough am not. I dislike leasing but I understand Unity's intentions (I think) and I want that people argue the right way. Not out of false mathematics or hyperbole. If I were the one responsible for the engine and sales I'd look at the people arguing the right cause with the wrong argument and be maybe a little to fast and easy to dismiss it.

Can I live with the current plans? Yes.
Would I want better prices or options? Sure!

(edit) also - for a total upgrad it would be 93,75$ per month over a 2 year cycle.
And again that is only then mandatory if you are >100k/year.

 

To be honest, given the nature of game development - especially cross platform game development, which is Unity's specialty - there's little practical difference between a sub an an outright license purchase. Either way, you pretty much need to pay as soon as your support period expires, otherwise you're in trouble as support for the product stops. It doesn't matter if that's when Unity releases a new major version or when a subscription period ends. Either way, you need the ongoing support so you're going to have to pay for it.

The jolt to me here was really just the rates, and how they've radically changed for my project's circumstances.

And lets not forget that you never really "own" software, you're always "licensing" it anyway.

 

Something that I had not thought about yet is how this will effect asset developers moving forward.

In order for you to continue to provide assets and updates, you'll be locked into subscription.

How do you all feel about that...?

 

Wouldn't most asset developers be on PE?

 

It's free for student for 3 years. After 30 days there is subscription with 30$ per month http://www.autodesk.com/products/stingray/subscribe.

 

Stingray uses only LUA for scripting and in a way way more verbose way than the one in CryEngine and that rings for me the "10 years old game engine" bell. 10, 20 years ago LUA was the best option for a scripting in the industry and really the only viable one back then. Now we are in 2016, we have better alternative, hardware is faster and you all must move forward: better programming languages, scripting languages, programming techniques resulting in better productivity and more time to create awesome games. Ex: C++14-17, C#, Haxe.
Cheers

 

What? How do you come to that conclusion? Why would you need Pro for asset development?
Free and Pro mostly have feature parity. And legally I've never heared that assets need to be developed on pro.
Did someone from Unity actually say that somewhere?

 

Wow - I wrote the first reply on this thread and have only just come back to see how may posts there are now. Unity have clearly screwed up the pricing scheme. How could they get it so wrong? Any new pricing scheme should be to the benefit of *all* users - nobody should have to pay more than they did before - its not rocket science.

 

heh, wasn't thinking as they changed the Pro requirement in 5.x, use to have to buy Pro to use plugins... I guess it doesn't effect them at all.

nvm.

 

Do you think they are on par now with Cryengine performance?

 

You had me worried there, for a second

 

No i didn't notice a so noticeable big boost performance from 4.10 to 4.12, it depends on what you do and use perhaps.
Using CryEngine they really optimized it a lot, i seen 30fps increase with the same level island running on 5 years old machine.

 

Last version of Cry Engine have a low overhead rendering, possibly is near to a forward rendering, Stingray really is not free, then we have this options for free: -Unreal, -Cry, -Lumberyard,- Godot and -Atomic (this 2 last are simply engines but very nice and lightweight)

 

Xenko ? Jmonkey 3 ? Banshee ?

 

Xenko looks awesome

 

Did you use maybe Xenko ? I see it also offers C# scripting like Unity. Does it provide anything like Asset Store to develop game while purchasing 3rd party assets ?

 

I'll definitely want to check out CryEngine but once they have a proper full FBX importer, possibly in 5.2 or 5.3. In the meantime, I'm learning Unreal and doing production work in Unity now.

 

The reason I worded my post thus was to remind people that the free version and plus are both subsidised by the pro users. This is a fact whichever way you slice it.

Pretty much every other company is operating at a loss they can afford. For example crytek and epic gain significant revenue from their own games (else they really wouldn't do so many) and stingray is backed by autodesk. Autodesk doesn't consider stingray capable of breaking even at present so it's bundled with Maya LT.

Unity focuses only on Unity engine, therefore appears to have a higher price point. I'm not judging this, only reminding why things might cost more.

 

Unity needs to create a viable mid tier plan, so they can monetize some of the massive free/personal users instead of merely increasing the price of Pro repeatedly. The current Plus plan won't do that, but the idea of adding a Plus plan is sound. Maybe all Unity needs to do is tweak the Plus plan, so hundreds of thousands of existing personal edition users switch to Plus. Then Unity would not need to lean so heavily on Pro users.

 

Haha, yes, that's why it takes so long to respond We have a lot of channels to cover...forum, blog, beta mailing list, social media... Well, also feeding back the responses as we get them to people internally.

 

Yes, and this is why I asked to get more information published, so we got them pushed onto the migration roadmap site. The info in the table edited into the OP was a temporary solution until we had that overview chart with detailed information on a production site. Will remove now.

 

I find this fairly irritating myself.

I'm a desktop only pro license myself.. this dramatically increases my costs to maintain pro without adding ANY value at all.

I bought Unity 4 Pro and upgraded specifically to Unity 5 Pro for the PBR lighting which only as of release 5.4B6 has finally become useable screenshot here ; mind you this is real time lighting. I've fully disposed of any thought of GI lighting as its a gigantic garbage ball of mud and completely unuseable.

Alternating every single release there are changes to the lighting engine that make all my "PBR" materials (that look beautiful in Substance Designer) completed screwed up in Unity until I change the material to finally make it look tolerable.

Then unity changes the lighting again and I update and once again .. everything looks like garbage again.

So I too am madly frustrated by the lack of stability, the complete lack of fulfilling feature commitments and then ball crushing a twice loyal pro Desktop customer with higher prices ?

I get it .. the people who were buying all 3 are cheering you right now - but anyone who was doing a single license is not - Unity's marketing/pricing guys in your super genius lab didn't think stuff all the way out.

I truly don't get paying DOUBLE is a good deal. ($1500 for pro license normally ; now is $125 * 12 * 2 = $3000) nevermind I used to qualify for the upgrade price of $750 so now it's going to be $2250 MORE than usual to "upgrade".

Can't they see this is a completely unpalatable price hike?

I guess once you've "captured" your audience you think you can charge whatever you want .. until you've no longer captured them!

Good luck w/ the new pricing, you'll need it.

 

If you keep the splash screen, I think you're going to be disappointed in the sales of Plus. I think this thread makes some very good points about the Plus audience, or lack thereof. As it stands, the only major selling point of Plus is cloud services, which I suspect the majority of free users who are ready to test the paid waters don't care much about. What they care about is the ability to have their game stand on its own merits. What they care about is the splash screen.

Semi-customizable is an improvement, but your own business model makes any splash screen a badge of shame. A pay-barrier splash screen is a clear announcement to the world that we are low-budget, which has a huge impact on how our games are perceived. Which will lower sales, which lowers the chances of us being able to afford Pro. I really can't see how this helps either of us.

Unless semi-customizable translates to "barely noticeable" (or Level 11 is included), I can't see Plus being worth $35/month to me or anyone else who isn't focused on cloud services. We want to be taken seriously, and we're happy to pay you for helping us, but we have to be able to make the sales first. We have to get the money before we can give you some of it. It just doesn't work the other way around.

 

That would totally work if there wasn't a free edition so you'd need more valid arguments than this. The idea that free cannot be a good earner is still in the realms of total fantasy with zero evidence.

I think plus feels like a weak product personally - I simply wouldn't pay for a license which still has splash. I did that once with torque, I'm not interested in doing it again. And look what happened with torque.

That said I'm a pro user, just interested in seeing stronger argument for product improvement.

 

Feedback on our editor is always welcome! Perhaps not in this thread in particular, but it's certainly something we need, research and collect.

 

One thing that does effect (some) Asset Developers, those who create custom UI anyway, is access to that dark skin. Why oh why this isn't just part of all unity licenses, when all real features of the engine have been merged, is mind boggling! Certainly going forward Asset Developers will elect for the free plan, as it makes no financial sense to do otherwise, yet they won't be able to make proper custom UI for the dark "pro" skin... seems like a real oversight on Unity's part.

 

So many people complaining about this splash screen, if they took it out, how many of you would pay anything to Unity? You don't seem to care about the other perks, if you did, you'd have the bonus of having the splash screen removed if you bought the higher tiers previously. So how is Unity going to make money off you? They've now compromised and took out "Personal Edition", I think that's pretty damn awesome considering you're not giving them a dime.

I also think it's awesome they're now charging $125/m for all platforms, this is way cheaper than buying all platforms separately..but now the PC only crowd is hurting. What are you going to do for them, Unity?

 

Again, depends.! For real-time games, CE still has the advantage.. If you bake / instance in UE it can perform just as well if not better. Engine choices will always be relative to your project, although I'd always say invest time to learn what they're all about.. Chances are you'll be stuck with them a long time and they all have their "quirks" Pro's / Con's..

 

Regarding performance you have to ask "are they on par now with cryengine performance, while rendering the same stuff with the same quality?" and the answer is: nobody is.

Because that's really specific to open world games with lots of foliage and the same post etc. It's something their entire engine is specifically built to do.

Probably sucks at side scrolling beat em ups, big time.

 

All i see is nonsense, they do not think about small indie PC developers!.

Why would we pay for all those mobile and such, if we dont need them?