Okay, so I was just checking my email and saw Unity sent me this nice little email about this Unity 5 offer - $750 now and you get Unity 4 right away and free upgrade to Unity 5 - I will will admit I almost push the buy button right there since I am still on Unity 3.5 and originally I thought upgrading to Unity 5 would mean I have to spend $3000 (full amount of licensing Unity Pro + Unity iPhone Pro).
…Then I check the forum (havn’t been here for a while) and saw the 2 bombshells.
Unity will cost me $1500 ($750 per upgrade since I am upgrading from Unity 3.5 + Unity iPhone Pro, but for other newcomers it means $3000) and it will last for the 2 year cycle before Unity 6 comes around.
Unreal Engine will cost me $456 for the same 2 year period.
CryEngine will cost me $238 for the same 2 year period.
Basically, Unreal Engine is now 1/6 ~ 1/3 the price of Unity. CryEngine offers even more incredible 1/12 ~ 1/6 the price of Unity saving. There are probably some finerprints that I am nto aware of (maybe over $100,000 sales they charge a higer % of the royalty?) but for indie studios, these are incredible pricing structure that offers far better incentives to the indie as they alleviate their financial risk compare to Unity’s far far bigger upfront cost.
Now, this puts in me in a difficult position for several reasons namely :
I have invested at least $1000 on assets from Unity Asset Store that I simply cannot use it on other engine (they are programming assets - not sound or art or 3D).
Learning a new engine can be a drag
The time and investment spent on the pipelines/workflow (plus little scripts here and there to glue it all together)
What do you guys think?
Do you think I should wait or do you guys think UT will yield to the pricing pressure of the competitor and lower their price to match?
None of which provide graphs. A graph would really show a lot more than the text-based comparison of up-front costs which people keep rattling on about.
Also, if you’re considering high-end game development it should be noted that console targets aren’t (I think?) covered as a part of these deals.
I know these changes and opportunities are new and exciting, but it remains the case that there’s no one stand-out winner.
I think you’ve made it clear that it’s not a “difficult position”. You just outlined really clearly how the “savings” you might make by switching will end up costing you far more elsewhere. Plus there’s always risk when changing from known to unknown stuff. Plus there’s ongoing costs from royalties if you’re considering Unreal.
When you take the newness and excitement out of the decision, it’s pretty clear to me that sticking with Unity is a better decision for you. (Though I don’t know other details that might impact it. Like, say, what you’re building.)
For a complete newcomer that could be different, because they’re choosing what to start with, not whether or not the added costs of switching are worth it.
Okay, a few factors here are that, unless they have a major change on the horizon, while the graphical features of CryEngine are ridiculously powerful, it is also severely limited in how extensible it is. If this is important to you, keep this in mind.
Another thing to keep in mind with UDK’s pricing scheme is that you actually only have to pay it every time you want to get an update or access updates/new content from their own asset store thing. Admittedly, it’s pretty important to keep it updated in this early state, as right now it’s pretty clearly more than a little buggy, but it actually can cut it down from $480 every two years to $160 if you just update every quarter. However, for how extensible the new Unreal Engine is, their asset store is a little bare at the moment (understandable) and their C++ workflow is… honestly pretty great, but also compiles about as quickly as a river of molasses in january.
However, Unity comes with its own issues. The Unity subscription model is, frankly, complete and utter garbage. There’s no way to get out of paying the $75 a month, since you get locked into a payment plan; you can’t put the money you’re paying toward an owned license, which is just mind boggling; you have to pay an extra $75 a month for each additional mobile platform you want to support with feature parity to Unity Pro, which you need to even buy the Pro versions of iOS and Android deployment tools, which means you have to spend up to $225 a month if you ever want to target mobile. Of course, this isn’t a good idea if you plan on using Unity for more than two years, which just drops it down to an upfront payment of between $600 (upgrade pricing) - $4500. Unity’s pricing system for mobile deployment feature parity has always been one of its worst features.
It’s important to realise that for all these prices, they’re per seat, which means they can add up pretty quickly too.
Unless you want constant update and access marketplace, only $19. With $19, you can download the full engine(with source). You can then cancel subscription. Then you can publish your product without ever re-subscribing. Yes I can confirm to this.
We know very few details of cryengine, hoping it would be similar to UE4 or better.
So that wraps up:
so unity pro is 1500/19=78 times more costly than unreal engine; assuming the fact unity 5 pro has same features w.r.t UE4(which is clearly not, rather opposite).
Currently I am examining UE technology. You can look for UE thread for updates/feedbacks of many guys.
Number 1 is pretty much true. You need to heavily modify unity c# scripts.
For 2 and 3, yes it will be a drag. Totally depends upon you. Some aspects are similar to unity while some are not.
Are you allowed to published with a non paying licence ?
Don’t you need to keep paying, when your game is published ? (if you are a pro, you will want bug fix from the engine dev, you will pay anyway…)
I am da bawss , I’m pretty much in the same situtation, but I will not change:
Changing will probably cost me a lot more than the few bucks I will get.
→ this will push every release for at least one month (but probably 3). In our market this can simply kill a game.
→ My time cost a lot more than the price of the engine. This will be get back my investement of my time in probably in 4-5 years. But I prefer giving me more chance to success now, than some few buck more in few years.
→ Unity is the first engine that look at the indie. Before that you will have to pay the 300k$ of the unreal engine… Just to be thankfull for that I will stay with them, and gave them a littlt of time to change their buisness model before jumping in the cheap train.
→ I don’t take risk with if it’s only for a few bucks
→ Their asset store and community are very young. Unity need 3 years before having some ok GUI system. You will probably wait as much for the other engine.
→ Most pro don’t take their decision only on the price (most newbies does). First batch of user that will go to the otehr engine community will probably be in majority beginner will a lot of excitement, but not much more… You will have to wait several years to get a community as strong as Unity community is now.
or a fraction of that, since you can freely cancel your monthly subscription anytime, and continue to use the engine/tools as you see fit (with the EULA restrictions in mind ofcourse ;))
You then can only pay 19USD again, when you need an update lateron. (if you don’t want every update they release, which is quite realistic)
So, on a 2 year period, you only might need say: 5 updates. 5 x 19USD = 95 USD.
So it’s you the licensee that chooses how much you are willing to pay for updates etc.
It’s Unreal Engine 4, NOT UDK, UDK is a totally different product, simply put a binary release of Unreal Engine 3. And UDK has completely different licensing terms aswel.
Well you forget that you don’t have access to their asset store if you don’t pay the subscription.
So you suppose that you won’t allow yourself to buy an asset every month. I’m pretty sure, that almost no one will take the trouble to subscribe/unsubscirbe. But people like the possibility to do it, and can use it has an argumentation… on the price.
While I think some people overstate the benefit - e.g. ‘you only have to pay 19, and can simply not subscribe ever again’ these terms do have their uses.
Let’s say one doesn’t use unity for a month - either they’re working on non-unity technologies or are doing something else (medical, work, education, vacation). With UE4 you pay $19 or $0 if you remember to turn the subscription off. With Unity, it can cost you $225+ for software you’re not using.
Why do these threads keep appearing? How does changing the price of something suddenly make it viable? Have you tried CryEngine or Unreal Engine? CryEngine isn’t suitable for anything in my opinion. The only people able to make games with it are Crytek. I also feel Unreal Engine is also a lot more convoluted than Unity. This may change, but in that case I would wait half a year or more before I tried Unreal Engine again to see if releasing the source has led to people creating a more indie friendly engine.
your question is the question of many developers, possibly Unity drop prices in some months, historicaly Unity take months to make this actions, but is sure that with the market presion that put UE4 and Cryengine they not have more option that drop the prices, the problem for Unity but a good thing for the indie developers is that the price of UE4 and CE are very competitive then if Unity not present a better price option this not affect to many game developers because now UE4 and CE are real great and accecible dev options, in my opinion (i work with unity free and UDK) this is a lesson to Unity, if you have a very limited free version that is a pain for dev and your pro version is very cost you cant have the fidelity of your users, for this reason many Unity developers are migrating to UE.
And if you have Unity Pro and your primary target is Android/iOS, you NEED them because otherwise you’ll lose all of the pro features. It’s ridiculous.
(UE4 is cheaper in terms of subscription, and the price iamthaboss says can become even lower for UE4 as i demonstrated)