Hello all
I have been reading and searching and reading and searching. I just want to make sure I understand this. You can get the free version use it to learn, create and even sell games but only on PC, and Mac (gross under $100k). You want to publish to mobile devices you have to buy the respective mobile version. So android you would have to buy the android license, at $750, or buy the pro version at $1,500 and then another $750 on top of that? Also looking to get the Oculus Rift and in order to develop for that you have to use the pro version for the shadows and a few other features? Im sure I had a few more questions but I can’t think of them cause its getting late and I’ve been reading everything I can for the last 4 hours haha. Sorry if this is the incorrect forum to post this to but I figured it was about the only support forum.
Thanks guys
The iOS and Android Mobile licenses does not exist any more, they are free with every new installation of Unity. You can publish games on mobile devices for free, but if you total sales across all projects exceeds 100.000$ you would have to buy the required licenses(with that kind of revenue it’s only fair).
Unity Free also supports hard shadows from directional lights, so you can have dynamic shadows using Unity Free. Developing for the Oculus Rift would require Unity Pro for desktop since it relies on some pro only features, but the Oculus Rift itself comes with an extended 4-month Unity Pro trial that you can use.
In case you want to develop an iOS game using Unity Pro with the Pro features for iOS , you would have to buy Unity Pro for desktop and Unity Pro for iOS for a total of 3.000$.
In terms of iOS, you can get really far with just the free license without having any major creative restraints, but the Oculus is pay walled due to its use of certain features.
Thank you
Yea I wasn’t to worried about iOS because from what I read unless its changed since the thread/article was started, you would have to develop on a mac using there IDE and get their approval and stuff. Kind of like the ID@ONE program for the xbox one. Which to an extent I understand they don’t want every 12 year old publishing stuff that no one will ever play and use up their server space. Plus it keeps the quality up. But then at the same time you cant just start out making games for those platforms, so it kinda sucks but in the long run makes sense. Thanks again.
On another note in regards to the $100k cap, I had already planned on trying to charge a $1 for a game and hope I get enough people to pay for it, to buy the pro version. To me only makes sense to try and start out with the best of the best. Do you have any experience publishing to google? Do they take a cut or anything, I guess that’s one aspect I haven’t looked into yet.
You can still develop iOS games using a Windows PC, but testing the actual performance and device specific functions would require some OSX based computer(maybe look into a 2nd hand Mac Mini). The whole compiling thing on OSX makes a lot of sense actually, since Unity builds the actual files Xcode uses to compile the actual application, this means that you can extend device specific functionality that can give you a much better end product. It’s not that Unity does not want everyone to make games and even 12-year olds can make pretty good things given the right tools, in the end it’s up to the quality control at Apple to decide what goes into the actual App store.
I know that Apple takes a 30% cut on every transaction on the App store and some quick searching suggests that Google also charges a 30% fee for transactions. I have tried publishing free Apps to the Google Play store and the process is pretty much the same as for the Apple App Store in that you first create the game in Unity, build the App compiling code, prepare it for shipping, compile the final app and then ship it to Google(though no OS limitations).