Unity 5.0 is still on my radar but they’re going to have to adjust the price a bit or make addons make sense:
With Unreal 4, you will start losing money vs Unity 5 at $90,000 (using dollars now to clarify). At this point, the royalties outweigh the cost of Unity Pro + Android Pro and iOS pro. This does not include WebGL (which I haven’t factored in here).
Blueprint is fantastic. There’s no 2 ways around it, and playmaker / uscript / etc … aren’t even NEAR as good. But C++ may yet be a stretch too far for some, however for those who prefer to script.
Horses for Courses. There’s some things Unity just does better right now, such as the up coming UI (yes UE4 has UI abilities, but you’ll probably want scaleform) and Enlighten (Although UE4 doesn’t even need it, you will need to pay extra to license it from their partner program).
Learning a new engine can be time consuming (Thanks murgilod).
More targetable platforms with Unity (but also more cost, lets not forget).
Unreal takes it’s revenue from your wholesale price (the amount it’s sold for, before vendors take their cut).
So while UE4 does seem incredible value (and for a hobbyist it really does blow Unity 4 away) for an indie thinking about making money, it’s not so cut and dried at all.
Ultimately, the price of Unity will have to come down if they’re to keep a lot of users. How it does, is anyone’s guess.
Transitioning from a Unity focused workflow with Unity focused custom tools to Unreal Engine could result in a good deal of lost time from acclimating to a new engine with new workflows.
While number one is a fact, I would rather take the $20 gamble instead of a $1500(and some add ons) gamble. With unity I don’t know if I’m going to lose a few thousands, whereas with unreal engine I’m guaranteed to only lose a couple hundred at most. In my student budget this makes a LOT of difference. After the 65k mark, Epic can take their extra cut, I’m happy.
Not really a good deal imo, I won’t be updating, Unreal engine 4 has linux support, and with linux editor incoming, I am not staying to deal with an antique mono. I am tired of getting shit on when I mention Linux on the Unity forums. Also, how awesome is it to pull from git from Tim Sweeney and enjoy full source code. Also webgl will be free, IOS for unreal, minus 5% and 20 but that is like nothing, if you make 10 dollars, Epic only makes .50. Hardly something to consider if your making a ton of money and nothing when you are indie.
I doubt I’m going to jump ship just yet, but I’m certainly going to invest in the licenses for the other engines- and through the process of learning the processes of the other engines I’m sure the best choice will prevail over time. Usually a quick weigh in on importing assets and creating a medium scene will do the trick for assessment.
My take is possibly Unity knew about this (if they didn’t that would be a shock) and that is why they have been doing Unity Cloud, Unity Ads and also of course Asset Store. They take industry standard 30% on those then they might actually want lots more content to fuel those networks and eventually Unity price comes down or very low, the subscription depth you take determines the royalties/cut Unity gets.
Ultimately the way to make money now is to take a cut of some aspect of revenue (Apple was ahead of the times in platform direction and we are still seeing the effects of it even today with Unreal’s asset store). Cloud, Ads, promotional networks etc are pretty big and Unity could have a nice non spammy one. I am sure this is in the cards. I think there will probably also be royalty versions of their subscriptions that are much lower.
The game engine subscription market has been shaken up (Unity at $75 per seems high now or $300 per month for game developers utilizing desktop/web, ios, android and webgl) that yesterday was flipped. Unreal was defensive for some time, Unity encroached on the AA and AAA territory and then Unreal just did the same on the other side, going right at Unity’s indie base that made them what they are today. Crazy indeed. Is subscription to game engines the new rebirth of publishers in some other form? Possibly. I hope they have many different options for different game companies and non game companies alike.
It does seem ridiculously high given that you don’t even need to keep paying that monthly cost to epic, just pay it once, and once again whenever you need updates. I think Unity’s subscription model will have to adapt.
The problem is that Unity is actually value for money, but educating people why is very much a lost cause. But that’s not the end user’s problem.
UDK has been free for a while, as well as cryengine, they just decided to make their presence more hospitable to indie developers now. These deals are more are less about value but gaining marketshare in the indie scene.
I agree with the points made and honestly no matter what I still feel Unity is a good deal for what you get, especially on a personal level. I wish it was a little bit cheaper though especially when you need several add-ons, but doesn’t everybody want things cheaper
However as i’ve said the perception of how good a deal it is has been pretty shattered by recent developments and Unity will need to respond in some form, though I very much doubt it will be anything like the sort of numbers people have been calling for.
They will have to respond simply becuase they face an eroded user base and even though they might not make any direct revenue from Unity free users, they do make revenue via the asset store and the potential to up-sell them from free to pro. I.e. they stand to lose not just ‘a few’ Pro users, but vital numbers of developers in their ecosystem.
Part of me wonders if they knew about this and that’s why they seem to have announced Unity 5 so early, plus Unity 5 pro users now get the team license for free on top of pre-order bonuses. However after today I just don’t think that will be enough, the question is whether Unity counter with something aimed at the hobby level developers and/or offer a more attractive deal to their paying Pro users.
The brutal thing is it’s $4500 PER SEAT. No one seems to be taking that into account yet. Let’s say you have a team of 4, you need to make 4 x $90k for Unity to be the better choice. They will definitely have to respond.
Keep in mind though, there is one thing that keeps Unity Pro’s price where it is. And that’s the existence of Unity Free. Unity really doesn’t have to do anything in response to Unreal, in fact I’d argue that would be very unwise.
For Unity Pro to go down in price to something similar to Unreal’s, you’d need to eliminate Free. And free is cheaper than $20/month, even if it means missing out on certain features. Missing some features is tolerable because you can still develop your game in Free and when the time is right, upgrade to Pro (or I should say IF you develop the game to the point where you need the pro features, because a lot of people don’t get that far).
Also, with Unity Free you can develop Android and iOS games for free, whereas with Unreal you’d still have to do the $20/month. So there’s that too. And neither of them ask for royalties.
Don’t get me wrong, $20/month + source code access is a fantasitc deal. But I don’t see this being a serious threat for Unity. They can both coexist comfortably.
Free is the reason why Unity has become such a threat to Unreal. They know it, and most of what Unreal has been doing has been in direct response to Unity. Unreal 4’s interface closely resembles Unity’s, UDK was released in response to Unity going free, Unreal emphasizing ease of use…I don’t think Unity should give up being proactive in favor of being reactive.
and how much does your product/game need to make in profit to support those 4 developers? Even if you pay them half, you still have to account that your product needs to make more than that to cover tax, marketing etc. Because don’t forget this is 5% on gross profits, so all those things have to be covered by the profit of selling your game and that affects the gross profit needed to be a substanable business.
So I’m not so sure its as clear-cut as people are making it out to be. However interestingly for small studios (1-5 devs) UE4 does have a strong advantage due to the discrepancy between per seat of Unity and flat 5% gross profits of UE4. Maybe we’ll see Unity address this aspect in terms of any counter-moves it makes.
Well basically you are comparing an engine that is out to an engine that isnt.
So you have to compare Unity 4 to Unreal Engine 4.
Unity 5 is non-existent in the reality of potential users. Its just something they see some videos about and some people talk about of what may or may not be included in version 5. For all you know it may not be released for another year, or 2 years more.
People wont know if Unity 5 is a good deal until they can get their hands on it and know with 100% certainty what its features are. Until then, its a bad deal. Very very bad.
Or you could pay the $19 just once, and then immediately cancel your subscription, and you can then develop your game in UE4 as long as you want and only resubscribe when you need to update. A one-time fee of $19 isn’t that much more expensive than free.
Maybe Hippo is comparing vs 5 because he already owns the 4 license thus there is no purchasing decision that needs to be made? I’d say many people here fall in to that basket.
None of that matters… no matter what other costs you have, paying less for an engine is always better than paying more. If you owe a million dollars in marketing fees and developer back pay, then paying more money in licensing fees isn’t going to magically make your other costs go down.
Yeah, but that kind of licensing shenanigan is more or less veiled piracy, since either way you’re evading payment for a product you’re using. I expect that they’re all piratable already if that’s really what you want to do.
