I spoke with a guy at SIEGE 09, he said “We could have Unity in school, but the teacher like free stuff, so we have XNA.”
I think UT actually offers school discounts but $0 is just unrealistic for a professional tech which already at the regular Indie price is seriously underpriced.
Would be as if you asked Discreet for $0 3DS Max school licenses.
They used to have Gmax 
I’ve recently been in contact with two Universities who are heading down the Unity path, which is good, soon we’ll be able to hire pre-trained minions! Mouhahahahaha!
Sadly, there was no Unity v -2 to create something comparable to GMax which is 3DS Max 4 or alike? 
They offer 6months of free trial to Universities 3DS Max I mean.
Well, universities aren’t poor. If they can’t afford Unity licenses, they probably aren’t terribly reputable anyway.
In certain fields (ala, post production) I’d consider them [degrees] a negative. I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with people who were trained a such. My experience thus far has been that a ‘nutcase’ who’s totally self taught is worth 10x someone who is university-trained.
That’s just my personal experience, and in a very specific industry 
“You’re only as good as your last job”
Hi Asterix
Just a suggestion Asterix Perhaps if you knock up a mental demo of what you can do with Unity and more importantly show your teacher how committed you are to the Unity Platform it might swing it and she might be prepared to fight your case to those that deal out the cash Money the…Principle.
Well I have nothing to do with University. I wish they teach Unity, it just not make sense to me to teach Unreal for people that will be most out of job when they graduate. If they got Unity training they could start their own project, but they only have unreal that cost over 20 000$.
My teacher applied for and received grant money to buy Unity for her classroom, and we’re not exactly a district with spare money to throw around. I’m sure your school system can afford Unity as well.
The cheapest license for the Unreal 2 Engine was $350,000, not sure about version 3. I mean Unity Indie only cost 199 which is probably less expensive than some text boxes for college courses. Instead of the students needing to buy a text book, just have them buy Unity instead.
Unity also offers educational licenses, not sure how much they are tho.
the books are a good point, because unlike most student course books, the 600+ pages of unity documentation are of use …
Actually, Unreal can start for whatever you can negotiate it down to As can Source (we’ve licensed both in some capacity over the years).
Let’s be real and start by comparing the depth of our pockets with the depth of those of Microsoft (hmmm, they have billions, we have something less than that). So right off the bat we all have to recognize that Microsoft is in a very different situation than we are with respect to how/when they can give software away.
With that in mind, we’re already doing things to reduce costs. Many of you are too new to know this but when we released Unity 2.0 in October 2007, we did so while dropping the price of Indie by 20%! Additionally we’re looking for more ways to do that in combination with ways to get heavily (and I mean heavily) discounted copies of Pro into the hands of students.
So we’re doing things, it’s just that we’re not in a position to willy nilly offer to give stuff away. We too have rent, payroll, electricity bills, server expenses, bandwidth costs, blah blah blah. We’re just not made of cash… yet.
Don’t see why comparing to microsoft. Microsoft is offering nothing for free actually.
University MSDNAA licenses are actually payed by the university, they aren’t free as in $0. They are just offered in such massive amounts that the per seat fees for the university get fairly more affordable and the license restrictions additionally help.
we had to wait for nearly two years at ETH zurich (swiss federal school of technology) to get MSDNAA due to the negotiations and decisions if they want to invest into that.
When I worked The MathWorks years ago, we sold, for about $30, a full featured version of MATLAB to students that’s sole limitation was a constraint on the the size of matrices that could be declared (a full install ran upwards of $10K). We also gave away, to major universities, the full featured product and various add on toolboxes, but with very limited support. The net result of both approaches was that today, you would be hard pressed in many countries to get an EE degree without having used MATLAB in school. And all of those graduates have gone on to make it a standard tool in a whole host of industries.
Seems to me that if Unity were to take a similar approach, there would be an awful lot of kids graduating from different game development programs around the world, walking into their first job and planting a Unity flag. At some point, you’ll start to garner enough critical mass to really make a serious push against the other game engines, at least in the smaller studios, and in the mobile device market.
From an economics standpoint, if you limit support, your marginal cost of doing something like this would diminish significantly. And if your worried about sales cannibalization, you could always do something like limit the number of game objects or components that can exist in a scene in an educational version. I saw, a recent Game Dev Magazine survey, that Unity usage was still in the low single digit range but making inroads. Seems a strategy like this my really accelerate adoption of what is a terrific product, especially given its price.
sadly the matlab licensing has drastically changed.
The student license is significantly scrapped since 2006.
So I guess independent of how nice the model is from the idea, it does not work out.
Today matlab is offering licenses to institutes and whole universities if they want the “unscrapped” one, which likely makes a significant larger amount of cash.
I think such a type of licensing would suite unity but I guess thats what they are already doing
Yeah, I heard they got kind of greedy. I worked there back in the 90’s, when they were still a relatively small company. Too bad…
Has nothing to do with greedy I think.
But if you are in a market where you have competition you must stay competitive and $0 or micro fractions of the actual development, research and support costs just does not allow you to have the resources to do so.
In the university area, the only reason stuff is offered at any discount at all is actually the same idea why drug dealers spread small amounts: to get you in touch and “hook you” so if you leave university, go to a company and are meant to work in that field, you are likely to want to have that app again. It has nothing to do with any interest to support students or be generous at all.
There are just companies with fat enough licenses to cover for such ideas (MS, Apple, Discreet, Adobe) while others don’t grow money trees from their often pretty “unfavorable” license structures (yearly upgrades in the thousands range and alike)
UT obviously does not grow such trees as we all know, otherwise the majority wouldn’t be hear as Pro would be the only license and owuld have yearly upgrade fees
If you limit support for educational versions of software and create a mechanism to prevent sales cannibalization, I think even today the strategy of “free/cheap for students” can pay off. And, of course, the only reason you would do this would be to “hook” students into becoming evangelizing paying customers later. I don’t agree that you have to be Microsoft to do this either. If you can get your marginal cost down close enough to zero, it shouldn’t matter how big you are.
And the alternative strategy of just slugging it out for the attention of the commercial and hobbyist developer seems like a tough road to me, even with such a great product.
Yes but you can’t get costs to 0 if you don’t have support contracts to compesate for the ongoing development, support and R&D
Applications that are not expanded during releases as those from MS, Discreet etc naturally can get off because all the ongoing additions and R&D ends in the next pay for version, they don’t offer feature enhancements for free.
But Unity has had 2 massive feature enhancement releases for free to all 2.x licensees and with 2.6 another one is coming and its the ongoing license sales that generate this income, so the basic condition under which it could be possible is not met. Unity does not sell point release licenses only and I don’t think its even possible to lock it down to one to offer such lowest cost licensees.
Additionally Unity does not sell tens of thousands of licenses of that lower cost to compensate for lower costs, its a “niche product” when put into global scale actually (exception is the iphone side)
Also a student who does not have $200 but wants to get into this stuff is just a daydreamer.
A notebook costs significantly more, the university costs significantly more and even his books per 6 months cost significantly more so if anyone comes up with excuses then he just should reconsider his “interest” or “priorities”.
Same goes for courses. If you want to use free to not pay anything, thats always fine. But also be aware that you restrict your flexibility as you can only do and use what you developed or got for free, which commonly means “not that much” and especially “without support and potentially broken”
By licensing a commercial tech you have the benefit that you also buy support, great support in case of UT and you have the seller doing all your maintenance work you would have to do. Its a matter of days at max weeks until that one time long term investment has already payed out again if you don’t have to waste a lot of time on maintaining your “self hack”. This is pretty elemental in such time critical environments as science where the researcher prefers to invest time in research instead of wasting it on additional documentations for the stuff used in the course if he could use it for something else.
I had my own share of “develop your own crap” experiences during my studies and I’ve to say that 2/3 of hour project time was wasted fighting against that instead of doing what was actually meant to be done. that was actually also the last time I developed technology like that myself, it was just too annoying to waste more time on maintenance and handling than on using (thats why I don’t like linux distris other than mandriva too for example)
Exception naturally is if they interenally developped something for research purpose but in this kind its completely unrelated as they don’t care for discounts at all, even at $0 it wouldn’t be an option.
But we are kind of talking into the nothing as UT already offers academic licensing and that possibility is already used so it works