Indirect cost of IL2CPP (Visual Studio)

[ErnestSurys]

There are a number of reasons for developers to use the IL2CPP backend when building their project, some targets like ARM64 even require this setting. Mono is not always the answer and shouldn’t be.

So it was a big surprise for me to discover that it has a very big drawback in a form of very expensive dependency.
This dependency is Visual Studio and is required to build games on windows machines.

For now the Visual Studio Community license states:

Who can use the Software:
Individual developers
Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps. In addition, any number of users may use the software to develop and test device drivers for the Windows operating system.
Organizations
• An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
• Any number of users may use the software to develop and test device drivers for the Windows operating system.
• For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1M in annual revenue) no use is permitted for employees as well as contractors beyond the open source, academic research and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

So in conclusion: if you aren’t an individual and want to do commercial projects with IL2CPP you need to pay for Visual Studio Professional (45$/month) or Enterprise (250$/month) for each developer.

This not only increases the development cost but also eliminates the competition. I would like to use Rider but in this case, it is completely not efficient to pay for two IDE licenses.

If this really works this way, this information should be more explicit, if not please correct me.

[pryankster]

For small teams, up to 5 users, you can still use VS community edition for commercial purposes.

[ErnestSurys]

Yes, this is exactly the problem.

• If your team has 5+ users, you need to pay.
• The fact that you need to pay isn’t obvious and easy to find.
• Using a different IDE than VS that you would have to pay for makes no sense. You would have to pay for both of them. This helps in Microsoft’s monopoly.