Why Unity 5.0 is STILL a good deal

I agree - but they they have been doing so in the [Official] threads. They can't respond on something they're not ready to release information about. I believe any information that does get released regarding price will have to be after more Unity 5 information.

But yes, official is always better than mods. Moderators won't give you information that's not been given by staff first. We can tell you things that you may have missed, or things we know are factual that's safe for release though, just to be helpful.

It's our role to help the community, not especially Unity itself interestingly enough. We're not told to be loyal or given any instructions - just to help out in the community

 

That's the most level headed thing I've seen you say on the topic lately.

I myself keep pointing out that Unity is (under certain cases) an objectively better deal, backed by math, as long as it's the right tool for the job. But even so, buyers don't typically make rational decisions based on objective criteria, and the competition is doing a great job of taking advantage of that right now, and also taking advantage of how people want to do things on today's Internet instead of last year's business world.

Unity's model was a great leap forward in the times when other engine alternatives were either cheap and crude or locked up at the far end of a significant business deal. I still think the pricing is reasonable, but we're not in those times any more, so there may indeed be alternative models that could be more successful in current times.

 

Well, there have been responses indicating they are listening from various Unity people who are not moderators, including the CEO of Unity.

 

I worked in and among major middleware before going indie, so it's frustrating to see the same mistakes others have made being repeated by UT. Middleware is all about market share and mind share and the most deadly thing they can do is mistake past lock-in and past lack of options for loyalty - it would be classic "victim of one's own success". UT has been slow to respond to their new competition, but they're starting - I just hope the slowness is due to deep soul searching and imminent awesomeness, not hubris. I hope this because Unity is, despite all the problems, the best architected option for the kinds of games I'm interested in writing.

Is UT still agile enough to react in time? If they decided tomorrow that they wanted to leverage the community by making source code available, how long would it take them to arrange the code such that all 3rdparty content was DLLed sufficiently to be acceptable to the suppliers? If they decided to have some kind of "wiki like" documentation, how long would that take? I basically stopped contributing to Unity Answers when it was taking ages to resolve silly problems like how moderation worked. Being slow to respond burns community value, and once it leaks away it's tough to get back.

 

Slow and tactical aren't the same thing though. I'm not saying Unity hasn't made it's fair share of dumb mistakes but I'm pretty sure the holding off on pricing change is the response, not lack of response

 

If I was writing a novel, UT would have deliberately engineered the discussion into being all about price since that's the easiest thing for them to "improve". The non-pricing content in the Official help-us-do-better threads is much hairier.

 

This is an official Unity response. We've heard members of the community say they like the $19/month price point that UE4 gives. Brett, who's our Product Manager has kicked off some [official] threads for this purpose. We've started releasing much more frequent releases with bugs fixed. There's so many changes that I see everyday it's massively rewarding to me (who's possibly more active on the community than most of the company) to see the company step-up.

 

Pricing can only go down, not up and it's not a decision to be made lightly.

 

Nor will it necessarily fix the problem. Pricing may be amongst the most common justifications for the switch, but is it among the most common reasons?

There's also massive brand power being wielded here. Even if the price points were identical lots of people would jump to Unreal just 'cause it's Unreal.

 

There's also the feature set, update speed, general support, and a whole host of other things that people kinda seem to ignore in these threads. And the update speed thing isn't even just a UE4 thing. Even UDK seemed to get more regular updates than Unity did.

 

I'm not ignoring them. I just don't have any problems with Unity in any of those regards. If they matter to your project then of course you need to take them into account when deciding on tools.

 

Well I can't disagree with that logic, but as Murgilod Unity does lack in features dependant on project. But I'd always like to have it even if I never use tool X, because you never know where the future takes you and you may require it at a later date.

 

Unfortunately, it's an issue that comes up a lot in these threads. It seems to be deeply related to the "F*** you, got mine" and "W attitude I see from a lot of developers on here and various open source projects. If something doesn't fit their use case, no matter how common it may be, all of a sudden it doesn't matter.

 

Well, why should anyone spend energy on something that indeed doesn't matter to them? I can't comment on the "f*** you" aspect of the attitude you're perceiving, but I wouldn't expect you to lobby for something that didn't matter to you.

Personally I'd rather plan and optimise for what I do know as opposed to trying to be all things for all situations. Flexibility is important, but if there's no way to predict that a thing will be of benefit to me then I'm not going to make sacrifices to have it just in case, if that makes sense.

 

Well there is a bit of common sense involved in engine design decisions, from a 3D development standpoint UE4 has everything you need feature wise. But I doubt everyone will use all the tools available..

Again I'd rather have them than not.

 

What about us that do pay for it? My personal standpoint has always been keep Unity free of game crushing bugs and keep the engine inline feature wise with your competitors and I'll ask no more of you. The pricing as is seems fine to me, doesn't really stir a motive to move.

Then again I can see why people doing mobile feel the heat fiscally.

 

Simply wanted to point out that indeed there are people who are fine with current pricing. I am, including if WebGL is a paid add-on. Common sense tells me that I'd rather make sure Unity is a profitable company that can continue expanding and hire top of the crop developers, pay for awesome middleware and make sure their best employees (Aras et al.) stay there.

I don't think you need to adjust on price at the moment. Unreal will take the spot for the $20/month "fully-featured" engine, you obviously have to offer something different but seeing what's coming up with Unity 5, I think you're doing good. Keep up the hard work!

 

I also think the lack of response about pricing is the response. So far suddenly lots of Unity developers have jumped into the forum to try to discuss with us, thing what did NOT happen in the past, and nobody at Unity was receptive at what we need. It's a good thing, lets see for how long this will happen and how receptive Unity will be from now. But nothing about pricing, so i guess.. that's the response.

You guys had the monopoly for a looong long time. Thats why Unity jumped from 800 if i am not mistaken to 4500 in a few years. Now the competition is real. So far every single response from Unity sounds like "we work for money", and here seems to end all the passion and pleasure to develop Unity. Maybe something is wrong at Unity, don't blame only customers, try to look at your side a bit more. Customers will eventually choose what's best for them. We (customers) do not beg for anything. We have the power to chose on what side we stay.

 

Let's not forget Unity practically invented democratic development at a time when other engines were happy to run up bills approaching a quarter of a million dollars. It's Unity that brought the market where it is today. Having that in mind when you consider what Unity may choose to do in future would be a good thing.

Avoiding royalties is pretty democratic to me, and a further tweaking to the pricing model would no doubt help - if it's the right thing thing to do as opposed to a knee jerk because the competition is baiting for a race to the bottom. As I've said since the start - it's about value.

Lets see what value is as a package deal, by the end of the year.

 

@hippocoder, you are not right at all.

Even when Unity Basic was $400 there was open source free engine available. And peoples made games with those free engines also. If you only take a look at sourceforge, you can find lots of repos with different engines. In other orders of ideas, there are peoples who don't use any engine at all for making simple games, they just made them with the available api for a specific platform. What Unity did with making free the Basic version, was a move to get more users who potentially could buy pro and use the asset store in the same time. I do not remember Unity regretting anything when they made Basic version free, and as a result 2 other company's in competition with them, gone bankrupt (as far as I know, can be more). The fun fact is that now history repeats, and Unity is in the position to keep the step with competition to survive.

 

That implies Unity is currently on the back foot and in danger when that's really far from the truth if they can afford 400 staff if you get what I mean? Since epic, they're hiring, not firing. That alone tells you a lot.

 

I am not talking only about Epic, is UE4, is CryEngine, is Project Anarchy.. and some others who I may miss right now. Fact is all of them have lowers the prices to insane level or are free. Numbers of developers who work on a engine/tool/software is just a number, as long as you are profitable. If Unity can have 1000 developers working on engine and be profitable selling the engine at $5, does not matter, they are in business.

 

I hope they focus on making the engine everyone wants to use more than on pricing. I wouldn't want them losing too much money due to going do cheap. They don't have a games business to get the money coming like Epic and Crytek have. They need to charge more. So to win, they need to have the best engine.

 

Maybe they could write a great AAA game and make money that way. If they were working on a AAA title they would also be pushing the engine further and faster.

 

So, by charging more, they will somehow manage to keep their sales/userbase?

 

I think their current pricing is fine, what they really need to do is beat the compeitition hands down in the engine development department. With the likes of Enlighten / FMOD they are making the correct steps, they seem to be really pushing bug fixes which is another step in the right direction.

They still have a long way to go, always quality over quantity.

 

But Unity has a free version. If it means buffing up the free version a little, that's all that matters. A lot of hobbyists just want to make the game, their game. They don't particularly care for using C++ or even like other engines. They like Unity and they want it free. So all Unity has to do to respond really, is improve the free version.

 

The pricing is fine for PC developers. They get quite a lot for $1500.

But for mobile developers, they pay $4500 for fewer features, and have to limit themselves on many other Pro features because of performance.

 

I agree, look up at my reply to Thomas at the top of the page.

 

Sorry, I missed your previous post. I'm having to manually mark the forums as read since the changes, and that system seems to have a few glitches.

 

I never said charge "more". I think they should charge the amount that will work out best for them, which likely will have to be higher than Unreal and Cryengine. They keep the users by having the best engine, because some users consider more than just price. You know, such as how well the engine will actually help with making a game. And since the free version will also keep improving (and free beats any price), I do think they have an edge still even in that pricing realm.

 

Now that I've used Unity 4.5 how can we be talking about Unity 5 still being a good deal?

Unity 4.5's graphics are atrociously slower and it seems functionality has been removed from Unity Free in 4.5 such that graphics are visually noticeably worse.

There will be some with top of the line hardware that will try and claim there isn't a massive graphics slow down but they are in denial at best and pandering at worse. It's like the 40 year old that thinks they can play like a rookie: even the steroids and HGH don't really help them they simply replace quicker recovery with power.

As far as charging more. Ha, Unity Free in it's current state will almost require that I move over UE4 or downgrade and say, forget the new uGUI. I have DF and nGUI and both are very nice.

If anything Unity Free will go away because it's just isn't capable anymore at this rate.

When people haven't tried UE4 yet usually they haven't tried because it is a general consensus that UE4 performs poorly on there HW compared to Unity. Unity 4.5 equalizes that concern.

 

We all understand that Unity needs to make money. What a lot of us hobbyists are asking for is the opportunity to help fund Unity. We want to pay $19/month for a Pro featured product. Us hobbyists cannot justify paying the current price for Unity Pro, so we were using Unity Free and many us have signed up for UE4. UE4's pricing and terms are perfect for hobbyists.

If Unity adds an option to license Unity Pro for the same price and terms as UE4, a lot of hobbyists would sign up. $19/month per user will add up to millions of dollars in additional revenues for Unity. So stop painting this issue as "everybody wants something for free", because many of us hobbyists want to pay $19/month for Unity Pro instead of getting something for free. We want to pay. Please take our money.

 

You add 19 a month from people who won't pay anything now, but how much do you lose from people who would have paid the higher price before?

 

I bet its like everything where the 1% pays for everything. So say it went from say $75 month to $5, they wouldnt get 15 as many users.

 

If you have a personal performance regression, and aren't just reading the interwebs where everything goes, please file a bug report. Unity takes performance regression very seriously and will simply fix it.

 

Citation needed.

My development hardware specs are as follows:

2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
8GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M

I've noticed no significant slowdown. Or slowdown at all.

 

What functionality are you talking about?

 

In my case, the only way to get around certain audio factors in my game was to create pre-filtered audio tracks. In a previous game, I had to scrap the first person maze segments of an RPG I was working on because there was no way to have it match the aesthetic I was going for without render textures. And then there's things like attempting to optimise larger projects without access to a profiler.

At this point, especially with the features that are being added to Unity 5.0, the lack of render textures and profiler in Free is kinda ridiculous.

 

The point is to make you go from free to a paid user.

 

Yes, and now there are enough value propositions in Unity 5 that the inclusion of standard features like render textures should not be locked behind a $1500 price tag.

 

This.

 

Fewer features due to limitation of performance is never going to be a good reason. Yes, you can use deferred. Yes, not every one is making a game, and so will use the high end shadow quality and so forth. There's also android and bespoke hardware. I'd say that most of the features in pro are accessible and used by pro users on mobile. Just because you (and me included) prefer not to use them for speed, doesn't make it less valid for an app developer or someone doing architectural viz on a tablet.

So citing "because of performance" doesn't fly. Can't fly, as a reason for it to be cheaper.

What could fly, is stating desktop can have it for 1500, but iOS only (no desktop export wanted) currently costs 3k.

At the back of my skull, I can see that it's overall revenue that matters, but for users, how many mobile developers wouldn't want a webplayer, or wouldn't want desktop builds?

 

True, but the answer is not as clear cut as you make it out to be. In terms of pricing, between Unity Free and Pro now sits UE4 and it sits much closer to Unity Free, while being a direct competitor to Pro. Now, for people with small prockets and big dreams (I believe the majority of indies) UE4 sits on a perfect price point. It doesn't matter if we don't need Pro features to finish our game, knowing we use the full version means we know we have the best possible tools at our disposal. My current game could have been completed with Unity 3, but that doesn't mean I am happy to use it.

Keep the same price
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Some people are worried that if Unity tries to compete with UE4 pricing they UT will go belly up. You are right to be worried. Changes that drastic in pricing are very risky. However, keeping Unity Pro at this price point is even riskier. How many of the current Pro customerswill eventually switch to UE? How many prospective Pro customers will too? For many, the clear choice will be UE4. You must have a huge edge over the competition to be able to keep such a big price disparity. Otherwise, you will be left with those succesfull enough to make the 5% royalty more expensive than $4500 per seat in 2 years, users from 3rd world countries where $20 is a lot of money and those not serious enough about game development, unwilling to even spend $20 per month.

Making Unity Free more powerful
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Sounds great! I myself am a Free customer! But hold on a sec and lets see the bigger picture. If Free competes with Pro more favorably, some prospective Pro customers will never switch to Pro. Unity will keep some Free customers from moving to UE, true, but, they won't be paying customers. Also, lets be realistic, Unity Pro is already having a hard time keeping up with UE. A cut down version of Unity could not ever compete with it. Not without hurting its Pro sales. The idea is to convert Free users to Pro, not the other way around. It seems making Unity Free more powerful is a big risk with very few gains.

Compete with UE in pricing
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If Unity matches UE's pricing, the real question is, how many users will jump from Free to Pro? What if Unity Free users don't bite and remain in Free? The easy solution? Kill Free if Pro goes that low. Just keep a non commercial version (watermarks/stripped of building capabilities) for educational purposes. If you believe your product is a worthy competitor to UE, the risk is not as high. Most of us invested in Unity will pay a small amount if the Free alternative ceases to exist. Anyone still wanting free will be able to use 4.5. In time most will switch. Unity will only lose a handful of Unity Free and Pro users. They will convert a huge chunk of their user base to paying customers and reduce the noise in the forum as an added bonus. The real risk here is UE's response to Unity's response. Due to their financial backing, what if they go completely free with no royalties unless you make more than X amount per quarter? Unity 5 better be damn good to compete with that. Keep in mind Epic can still do that, even if Unity keeps their current pricing.

Lower the price but do not compete with UE in pricing
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This is risky as well. Many (myself included) are holding off here waiting for Unity's response. If it does not prove to be the best deal, we'll leave. So, Unity might end up with less money and users. Maybe Unity can mix it up a bit. Kill Free (for a unity free user I say this way too often) lower the price of Pro to double that of UE, but heavily advertise "no royalties ever". Offer discounts on long term contracts, like most memberships and subscriptions. Many people in the forums have offered some cool ideas on this.

Good luck UT! I like it here, I hope you'll be able to keep us...

 

As Unity Pro keeps improving, Unity free can keep improving but stay a bit behind. That way there's always incentive to use pro, but free is getting better and better as well and can compete with the other engines.

 

We'll see once 5 rolls along, what the feature split is. Currently, I can't help but think there's a lot of assumptions from people who threaten to go to UE4, but end up realising that value isn't just features, but the api and how Unity works. Perhaps there's a lot to be said for the simple ease of use with the component model and enjoyable c#. C# isn't coming to UE4 in a reliable format unless Epic do it themselves. Don't kid yourselves. It's 3rd party and we all know how well supported that's going to turn out like.

There's a lot of talk "we're going to bugger off to UE4 if something's not done!" well I must be alone in thinking that I'd quite like to stay here regardless. I'm probably not alone, I think a lot of people just flat out prefer Unity.

 

Please read my "keep the same price" paragraph. Based on previous posts you made, I gather you belong in the minority that makes so much with Unity that it ends up cheaper than UE. You are certainly not alone. But you are in a minority. A minority not enough to sustain a healthy business for Unity.

"Threaten" was a very poorly chosen word, when we are merely stating the obvious, we'll move to the engine that serves us and our pockets better. I love Unity and I am gratefull for all it has offered to me so far, I would never "threaten" them with anything. I also never said there are no advantages of Unity Pro over UE4. But even if in the end Unity 5 proves to be "the better" engine, will I think it's worth the price difference? Will most users think it does?