Interesting mail from Oculus - The unity plugin will be shown at GDC next week (Booth 208). This will be a plugin, and will require Unity Pro. But they’re also shipping it with a Unity Pro 4 month trial. Supposed to start shipping right after GDC, at about 1000 kits (or so) per week. (Hopefully in order, since I was an early backer!)
Can’t wait, looking very good.
I hope the Rift works with Unity Web Player… they have been fairly quiet about the plugin requirements except it seems it requires a Pro license.
I would think that it wont be web player compatible.
i just ordered one. cant wait!
I guess it must be using a native code plugin then? It seems like that’d probably be the easiest way for them to transmit and parse all the data that thing needs to send.
I disappointed that it requires Pro, I think the part of the spirit of the Rift was to be an indie thing. I have iOS + Android basic, and since you can’t mix licenses it would cost me over $4,000 to upgrade to Pro which is obviously out of the question for what is basically a hobby. Even $1,500 just to use a dev kit which cost me $300 seems a bit over the top. I hope they add a new intermediate licensing option that allows Rift development in an affordable way.
You can have basic mobile licenses with Unity Pro, so your upgrade cost is $1500, not $4000. (i personally have Unity Pro, and IOS/Android basic). But, the good news is that they are giving you a 4-month trial of Pro, so that’s plenty of time to get something ported and working, and shown on Kickstarter or to a publisher. 
I thought they didn’t let you mix, i guess that has changed?
It is still five time more than what I paid for the hardware.
Most Unity games aren’t funded through publishers or kickstarter, there are a lot of self-published games funded out of the developers pockets. It’s not realistic to expect the 100s or 1000s of people using the Rift with the Unity trial to all get external funding within four months.
The reality is this is going to force indies into buying a professional license to play around with this hardware. I would expect there is a good reason, i.e. the Rift integration requires Pro only features. However I’m sure there are people who aren’t on Pro that want to develop for Rift using Unity.
Nope, hasn’t changed, has always been that way.
You’re allowed to have different licenses as an individual, e.g. like Jaimi I have Unity Pro + iOS/Android Basic. But every employee of a company has to have the same licenses, e.g. my business partner also has to have Unity Pro + iOS/Android Basic. If one of us wanted to upgrade from iOS Basic to iOS Pro, both of us would have to.
What Unity wants to stop is everyone in a company using Unity Free except for one person who has Pro and is used to do the final publishing. E.g. they want to stop a 100 employee company only paying for 1 Pro license instead of 100, losing them thousands of dollars.
I hope that all makes sense.
4 months is quite a long time for developers to work out if they can/want to make a game that works with/requires Oculus Rift support. If an indie really can’t raise the funds for Unity Pro in that time but still thinks that pursuing development with the Oculus Rift makes sense, there are other options, e.g. using UDK which I believe is also getting support right out of the gate.
Game development costs money. It can cost a lot of money. In the end it comes down to the individual developer to work out how much being able to work on a specific game/piece of hardware is worth to them. For me, getting Unity Pro was a no-brainer as I love making video games, the game I was making at the time required Unity Pro and am serious about making them.
Given that you already have pro, you are completely unaffected by this.
This is completely counter to Unity’s mission statement:
My point still stands that development with the Rift with Unity costs five time more (on top) than the device itself and this is not at all democratizing development. I hope that in the coming four months UT work something out to provide a more cost efficient option for indies.
Yeah, I’m sure there’s no TECHNICAL reasons at play here. Nope. None at all.
I acknowledged that in my first post:
There is no technical reason why Unity couldn’t make a new license which offers Rift integration without all the bells and whistles of pro.
Rift doesn’t require all of the bells and whistles of Pro, but it requires some of the bells and whistles such as render to texture to support the image warping and side-by-side rendering. They could well make another licensing level, such as a Semi-Pro which only included the necessary features but that would still developers money to buy the license. If they released it for free they might as well just move those features over to Unity Free. By the same logic they could make a license called Semi-Pro AI which has the nav-mesh features or any number of other license types which implement selected Pro features at a cheaper price. I’m sure lots of people would want nav-mesh support but not need render-to-texture or image effects.
If they make a middle-tier license for Rift support it would be opening a pandora’s box of “If you did that for the Rift, why don’t you give us this license instead, I need X, Y and Z features but not all the bells and whistles of Pro?” Creating more license types may not be a technical issue but it is a business issue which they won’t just snap their fingers and decide to do, especially as Unity Team aren’t the people who make the Rift or it’s integration with Unity. The requirement of Unity Pro to develop for the Rift is no different to the requirement of Unity Pro for certain products sold on the Asset Store.
They already did this with iOS/Android indie, it has a different feature set to Unity Free, (plugin support) but is equivalent in most ways. It is basically a it’s own platform so a licensing model which matches would be good.
I never suggested a middle-tier license, all I want to see is an indie license which is supports Rift development. They could make some specific hooks so that the Rift integration functions properly without any user facing Pro features.
It is entirely different since the Rift is a piece of hardware. Pro features are there to improve workflow and enhance the game such as more advanced rendering etc. the fact that it is now a barrier to entry for this new platform is something new. Previously there have been indie licenses for all supported platforms.
What you’re suggesting is for us to support the Rift as another platform license add-on. Would you be willing to pay $400 for a Rift add-on license? Probably not.
I think the 4 month free Pro trial is a pretty good compromise and plenty of time to get your feet wet with Unity and Oculus Rift.
Given the option of $400 and $1500, I know which I would choose.
The Oculus Rift is not a new platform, it is just a new piece of hardware for a current platform (i.e. desktop computers).
Do you really think that Unity should support all new hardware, out-of-the-box, for free? How about they add first-party support for Wii-motes (for desktops), the Kinect (for desktops), the Leap Motion Controller, or any other of hundreds of pieces of hardware that I’m sure a lot of indie developers would like to play around with, for free? Where does it stop?
Some of these pieces of hardware don’t require any pro features and are supported by 3rd-party developers who want to make plugins for them to work in Unity. Some require Pro features to work. Again, where should Unity draw the line?
I guarantee you people would whine they’re now charging for more than platforms. And I could tell you whom too.
It is launching on Desktop but is not specifically tied to any platform. If this technology takes off I think it’s safe to assume most platforms will start adding support for VR peripherals.
I have made my expectations pretty clear and explained the reasons. Please speak to the point rather than putting words in my mouth and straw manning.
You may see me as straw manning but that doesn’t change the fact that Unity would have to deal with a huge amount of backlash, complaints and requests if they introduced a new “Oculus Rift License” which is why it would never happen.
Any time a new License is introduced, there are a lot of people who cry fowl about it (I’m not saying they are wrong or right). Just look at the semi-recent announcement that Unity would be supporting Windows Store Apps with new Licenses. It required Unity representatives to post about the kind of effort that was required to support Windows Store (almost a complete rewrite from memory) before some people started to back down and accept it. There were still a lot of people who didn’t accept their reasoning.
There have also been practically hundreds of posts on these forums under various different topics with people asking for various Pro features to be available in the Free version of Unity and on occasion, in a new, cheaper license. Every one of those posts has been met by similar posts by other users saying, “Unity should not give us feature X that you’re asking for because I want/need feature Y and they should give that to use in the Free version instead”.
So, without knowing the facts yet, I could guess that Oculus Rift support might require these Pro features (as mentioned by Devilbox Games and others): native code plugins, render-to-texture and post-processing effects. If they offered those as a separate license, people would be hammering them with requests for a license that just includes realtime shadows or occlusion culling or any of the other Pro features.
This thinking leads to the idea (that has come up a lot in the past) where users pay per the Pro feature(s) that they require. I’m sure that Unity has thought about this option, and thought about it a lot, as they wouldn’t be a good business if they didn’t think of other possible business models. No one but Unity employees will likely ever find out why that is but my guess is that it doesn’t make business sense and/or would be much more effort to maintain/support.
Now I know that a lot of this is besides the point of asking Unity to just support the Oculus Rift out-of-the-box. This would require a lot of work on Unity’s behalf in liaisoning with Oculus VR, testing any code that Oculus VR supply to them and creating a system that uses render-to-texture and post-processing effects without allowing a user of Unity Free to access these features for anything other than Oculus Rift support. There are other problems that I’m sure would come up during this integration, as anyone that has working on any big project or big piece of software (like Unity) knows very well.
So, as I’m sure Unity is asking themselves this, why should Unity do any of these changes/additions?