Thank you Unity for making Learn Premium content free!!!

As in title i’m really gratefull of this transfered into free content cause this is very nice source of knowledge.

Appeal to everyone asking about help:
Dive into that premium knowledge (or even basic that was free from the beggining) and dont try to use search button to find specific answer about your problem you must search but in most cases you will find the answer, way of resolving problem.
That tutorial about flocking behaviour help me push progress of developing my long developed project.
So, again, search search search for answer here in unity learn section and in most cases you will find the way.
Big knowledge, BIG THANK YOU Unity!!!

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It used to be free. Free learning material has always been one of Unity’s strengths.

Premium learn is an aberration. I really hope they move away from this model permanently.

I don’t think that is accurate. Learn has always had an amount of content available for free; Premium was some specific extra content on top of that, a lot of it from partners like Pluralsight, which, AFAIK, was never free - until now.

Take a look at the ‘Content Tier’ filter setting on https://learn.unity.com/courses/?k=[]&ob=starts - you can still filter to see which content is tagged as Premium, compared to which content is tagged as Free.

Its accurate.

Before 2019, all Unity produced content on the learn site was available for free. With the recent announcement it looks like all of the premium learn content is available for free again. There was a very brief period between June 2019 and June 2020 where Unity started putting new learn content behind a pay wall.

You can verify this by checking the course content you linked. The oldest premium content uses Unity 2018.4, which was released in May 2019. Alternatively you can check back through the forum posts where complaints about paid content and questions of “is it worth paying for?” started.

If you want to count the plural sight partnership as pay walled Unity content, you still only go back to 2017 with “swords and shovels”. That was the first time Unity started recommending people pay for learning material. Before that all of Unity’s advice was to use the free content.

So I think I’m justified in saying pay walled learning content was an aberration for Unity.

(Or at least I hope paid learning material represents an aberration and not a new normal.)

I don’t understand. What do you mean “again?” When was the premium learn content available for free before? (Other content was available for free before, but never this content, as far as I know).

By “it used to be free” I’ve assumed you are talking about this specific content. If you just mean that Unity Learn in general used to be 100% free content, then yes, that’s true.

What’s your objection to having some premium learning materials? I mean, even with our recent change, there is still a lot of paid content about Unity out there in the world - books, Udemy courses, etc. What’s the problem with Unity advertising or reselling that content? You’re worried that it would cause us to release less free content than we would otherwise have done?

Poor choice of words on my part. What I’m saying is “the latest and greatest content produced by Unity is now free”. Unity changes a lot, that’s just how the technology world goes. Which means the most recently produced tutorial content is generally the most valuable.

There are a bunch of issues. In no particular order:

  • Unity tends to market paid content more heavily than free content. This leads to people paying for content they don’t need.
  • Paid content generally isn’t accessible to the whole community. If some new user comes on with a question about a paid tutorial, other users often can’t simply grab the tutorial to help out.
  • It moves Unity’s profit to when a game developer starts working, not when a game developer succeeds.
  • It creates a barrier for new users. Which doesn’t align with Unity’s goals of democratising game development.

For a long time, Unity’s success has been driven by how easy it is for new users to pick up. Students and hobbyists picked it up because it was free, and learn was effective. They carried the engine with them through to larger projects and studios. Premium learn represented a barrier to that. It was saying “you can’t come in to this engine unless you are already wealthy”.

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You’re making a distinction between “premium” and “non-premium” learning content.

To the average new-ish user who needs to use it there is just “learning content”, and sometimes they had to pay for it.

Edit: Also, consider from that new-ish user’s perspective, if you don’t have money and are therefore restricted to the “free” stuff, but you know there is also “premium” stuff, what impact does that have on your confidence? You can’t learn the same stuff as other people who can afford to buy the premium content, and you assume it’s important because that’s the stuff Unity decided was worth money.

I understand that both objectively speaking and from Unity’s perspective there’s nothing inherently wrong with charging for learning content. It’s a vaulable service which costs money to provide. But it’s also worth considering it from the perspective of the people it’s made for and considering if its holistically the best way to go forward.

Though since it’s free now I hazard a guess that ight be exactly what you did?

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This part is true for most business plan aspects of Unity.

About Learn: Learn in general, went from a pretty decently structured place we could point new users towards that they would get something out of, to a super “gamified” and unstructured place we could send new users to be… marketed at for premium tutorials.

Learn became a free to play game, with all the caveats and issues those games have. You can’t just add monetization to something and claim it’s unaffected.

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I did some digging. There are still some pages you can direct learners too. Although I won’t send anyone to the front page of learn now.

For example https://learn.unity.com/project/beginner-gameplay-scripting and https://learn.unity.com/project/intermediate-gameplay-scripting are the equivalent to the old scripting tutorial page. I’m more than happy directing people there.

The trouble is that unless you know what you are looking for, its impossible to find from the front page. @superpig , maybe that sentance sums up my dissatisfaction more. I can’t just send someone to a single click page now. They have to wade though pages of marketing first.