Let’s pretend Unity offered a new licence option and you are ready to buy the pro licence, which one do you choose? Not to say that unity’s currently standing pro licence system is unfair, but it’s not for everybody. Some people develop slowly and want to develop with pro feature but not be rushed to make a finished game in a few years. I want to access if anybody other than me would be willing to give a cut in exchange for lower or no upgrade cost. If this third option existed would anybody use it?
NOTE: I AM NOT SUGGESTING REPLACING THE PRO LICENCE, BUT ADDING ANOTHER OPTION.
Update: Well as the discussion continued it was brought up that people could do the second option for free upgrades then at the last minute switch to a normal licence to dodge their royalty fees. So I guess the idea needs more work.
The biggest alternative to the standard licence is the idea of a subscription, vote the third option if you want that. But still a user could subscribe for one month then get Pro for like 35 dollars.
Current solution for second option:
If the second option is to work, games made with that licence option would require some kind of un-removable code built in, maybe a special unity splash screen, with a subtle color difference so anyone playing the game would immediately know the licence used, this way users of this licence couldn’t develop then switch to the other licence to avoid paying the royalties. Also it would have to be impossible for the project to be opened in any other licence version of unity.
So the way the free version is light grey and pro is dark, this third version would be some other color and it would be it’s own isolated version of unity to ensure no sneaky licence swapping. This puts pro unity in the hands of users who don’t like to pay upgrade fees when they don’t use unity fast enough for it to be worth it.
Or this solution: HERE It is an idea about having version insurance for people who buy the pro license close to the release date of a new release. Instead of having a sharp cut off that kind of screws people, it could be spread out monthly.
In a sense upgrades cost are subscription fees. You are paying for the privilege of having been allowed to use the software. The only difference is in the increments of how you pay.
I’d like an a la carte system. If you need specific features that are in pro, but not free, you can pay to have them enabled. Of course, it’d be vastly less expensive to just buy a full Pro license than to buy all the extra features and there’d have to be some really careful pricing options so less-used pro features aren’t overlooked, but it’d be helpful.
Yeah, I thought that system would be nice too, but I didn’t explicitly include it as I think it would be a mess for unity to implement. It would be nice if there were special licencing options made available for users with different needs.
A mess to implement? Absolutely. But the money they’d be able to make off of things like people being able to, say, go onto the asset store and just buy new features would probably pay for all the effort really quickly. Imagine if they also put a system in place that would determine the extra features needed by other people’s asset store products and allowed you to add the missing features to your cart automatically.
Yeah, the result would be people who don’t buy the Pro licence because of the cost would buy individual features, however it would also mean that people who bought the pro licence if given the option to only buy individual features may not have bought the pro licence. I’m curious what studies they did to determine that their way was the way to go.
An a la carte feature license would be a nightmare for us (both in development and sales). We’ll take a page from Apple’s playbook and keep our product line simple
Sure they should probably offer you a Pro + take 30% of what you make with it as another product in addition to current licensing. I’d still gladly take the current system over that.
Just because those backwards loons at Unigine have a crazy policy doesn’t mean that Unity’s comparably reasonable policy can’t be improved. And I’m not asking for Unity to sacrifice anything, with my second option either A: I don’t make any money and paid 1500 for pro and nothing for upgrades, unity made money and lost nothing, or B: I make money and unity made 1500 and 20% of profits, either way unity wins and I got to develop for as long as I want assured to have up to date Unity.
I would prefer a subscription, I guess it’d be pretty easy to implement where we pay monthly or quarterly a fixed price, say for example £30 a month, this would not only make Unity more accessible to people like me and others who cannot afford the hefty £1k+ price tag but would mean Unity would make more money. I would have a team license, pro and asset server if they were on subscription. This would also make it ‘safer’ for people like me to use Pro.
Right now if I saved up the money for Pro, by the time I saved up £1k Unity 5 would get released. I simply do not have this kind of money right now (my financial situation may improve though who knows?) and this would be a huge benefit to me. This would also help curb piracy a bit.
please PLEASE give us this option, I know I’d buy a subscription the minute I see it in the store.
The royalty option would be a good idea, whoever it would be a bit of a nightmare for them to police.
What ever happens though I would like to see further licensing options.
Another option would be to have an unlimited trial… where you get all the options, bells and whistles but you also get a forced splash screen and the text “Unity Pro Trial” in the corner to prevent people from just selling their game without a valid license. Maybe on the splash screen you’d have a further message saying something along the lines of “If you paid for this it was created using unlicensed/trial software” or something
I doubt piracy is a concern for unity, can somebody really market a game they made with a pirated copy? While it’s unrealistic to think like maya or photoshop will de-compile all games to see if any non authorized assets where used in the game, Unity would be dumb not to ensure games are not made with pirated Unity software. And if people are pirating Unity and selling games with it, lets go beat them up.
30% is fine too. Hell, I’d be willing to go equal 50/50 with unity myself in exchange for them keeping my pro up to date and that’s on top of me buying the 1500 licence. Though I think it needs to stay around 20-30% for anyone else to go along with it.
I suppose so, and also small monthly fees are easier to pay, so there’s another difference. I’m not opposed to the subscription plan either. In fact that may be just as good as my suggestion as it allows me to stop and start up the subscription based on when I’m using the software. Their current model scares me away from investing because the value will diminish and I may not get enough use out of my hundreds or thousands of dollars invested.
