This ^^
They can do away with the 12 month contract, and just revert to the free editor if you login to the editor and don’t have an active subscription. This is how most other industry standard software works. UE4 requires you to login before you can launch the editor, but there might be a shortcut around this.
I wouldn’t complain and I might be tempted to subscribe but honestly I don’t need Pro for my efforts and Pro doesn’t bring any extra prestige - either you need the features or you don’t.
No, with the free license around they really can’t do away with some long-term kind of contract, otherwise many people will only pay for Pro around release time.
++; I would certainly just pay when the game is ready to build.
They won’t do anything; They don’t have to. But in few years this community will be hurt by the decision of doing nothing.
Will it? As others (and I) have said, there’s already a free license. And a lot of the stuff the free license can’t do isn’t that important for people at the entry level.
I wouldn’t argue with a price drop, but I’d hope that if there is one it doesn’t make Unity less stable as a business. Personally I think it’s more important to advance the engine than to drop the prices. There’s already a lot of stuff I do un Unity that I honestly wouldn’t want to do in the two prominent competitors, so when those entry level people get to the point where they’re looking at doing bigger things I think it’s important that Unity’s value proposition makes the price a non-issue, rather than cramming to get the price down (and suffering the consequences).
When I’m pitching to get a project started I think it’s far more valuable to give compelling reasons to budget for licenses than to present a cheap tool. If “cheap” is the primary reason for a decision I for one wouldn’t be confident that the tools in question were evaluated effectively.
+1
I think they should get rid of free and just move to a $50 subscription fee that you can cancel at anytime.
Make it simpler for everyone involved.
And really if you had to be honest… I think the free version does as much damage as good. Anyone who really wants to make games can manage $50 a month, and it would cut out all the uncommitted people on here, focusing and strengthening the community much more.
$50 a month is pretty expensive for a hobbyist.
I don’t think so. This can be easily afforded on a minimum wage job, and pretty much any gamer spends at least $50 a month averaged out over the year on consoles, peripherals or games for the console. Either pay to play games, or pay to make them. I mean it’s pretty much the same amount of money it costs to use Flash on Adobe Cloud, which still has a thriving hobbyist community.
While I do like the concept of revert back to free if you cancel your sub, its still very close to having a working version of Unity to develop the core of your game with, so the problem with this is that people will abuse it like many have stated they will do so with UE4’s $20 subscription.
That is why you have to have a license fee added into the mix (and as pointed out make it on gross sales, not profit) or you revert back to expensive only subscriptions. Problem with license fees is that it’s a pain and expensive to manage, not to mention chase up people who try to avoid paying.
Though that’s not to say that Unity’s subscription model shouldn’t be tweaked, its always been over-priced and there is an argument that perhaps many hundreds of thousands of people paying a small amount each month could easily become as profitable as full price purchases, the problem is as ever in getting the details right.
UE4’s sub isn’t their revenue stream. It’s just an admin and bandwidth thing for them, a bit of spice. I honestly doubt they give a damn about it hence the OK for you to quit paying unless you download more stuff.
The entire business model is different.
Unity: pay to develop
Epic: pay from sales
This also creates a different development structure for the company. It’s more likely not to defer features or fix bugs in the next version because this version doesn’t really end. It probably won’t reach an Unreal 5 unless there’s a dramatic shift in hardware (ie everything goes path tracing).
Unity would have to make everything free (with a $20 support cost after a trial period) and adopt the same business model to offer the same subscription cost. They can’t the way Unity is structured with free/pro.
Whatever Unity does, I’m OK as long as it remains royalty free. I do want Unity to start finishing features sooner. That’s getting slightly thin now. I think expectations for 5 are very high, and I want to see a lot of finished features and fixed bugs 
All I know is that the business models aren’t compatible to simply price match on sub fees. It’s a bit more complicated than that.
Wouldnt mind a more reasonable upgrade price…
The free version is an excellent way to get indie and hobbyist to try Unity. In many cases, the free version leads to sales in the asset store (which Unity gets 30% of) as well as upgrades to the Pro version. If you get rid of the free version, it will hurt the Unity ecosystem a lot more than it helps it. If anything, Unity should add the Pro features to the free version and really push the asset store. One simple way to promote the asset store would be emailing everybody (or at least all free users) weekly to let them know about cool assets available in the store. Unity could also showcase paid assets in some well written tutorials to further boost sales of assets. This approach would be very effective against Epic’s $19/month offering. Your idea of charging $50/month and getting rid of the free version would not be effective against Epic’s $19/month offering.
Does the asset store make a tonne of money? They would need to be making more then the sales of pro license to do that. Perhaps they could reduce the price though because of increased asset store profits.
my .02 cents…
as a long time Pro + IOS pro owner/up-grader (since 2.6, doing the math and it’s like $5400) + tons of asset store purchases.
This is the first time I didn’t just “throw money at the screen” and get the next version.
other then a mono update, they hit almost every point I hoped for in a new version and then some (enlighten was an OMG cool, didn’t expect that).
However, due to current events…How Unity responds will determine if I upgrade again.
No need for the “jump ship” mentality, UE4 and Unity are just tools and I will use what’s best for any certain project.
What I’d like to see is just roll all the “add-ons” into pro.
This is what has always rubbed me the wrong way, paying the full cost of the core app just to deploy to each platform.
I will gladly pay the pre-order fee if they did that.
Just to be clear, I’m definitely not saying they should stop selling Pro. What I am saying is that Free should have the same features as Pro. Pro would still be required if you sold more than a certain threshold. Right now, that threshold is $100k, but they could re-evaluate that number (and possibly choose a much lower threshold).
Unity has a choice to make right now. They can either pretend UE4 does not exist for $19/month and hope everybody plays along. Or they can offer a better deal than Epic, and blunt UE4’s momentum. Unity could use this moment as an opportunity to build even more buzz. Everybody is looking to see what Unity’s response will be after the recent exciting news about UE4 and CE. If Unity plays this right, it could bring a lot more people into Unity’s ecosystem.
To be honest, I was hoping for $25-$30 a month.
Just waiting now to see what they will say … the fact that nothing has been said is a worry. They don’t need to make an official announcement just that they are looking into a new price structure and will let us all know soon. That the endless comments on the forum are being heard and taken into account.
The silence is a bit deafening.
I think it’s more of a case of Unity need a bit more time and data to decide. Just because UE4 has arrived, doesn’t suddenly make the value of Unity drop. Let’s not forget Unity is royalty free. I think what people are asking for is hobbyist access or such. Unity probably need a week just to read user reaction and see if anyone actually does leave. UE4 isn’t as easy as people make out.
As all this is new to Unity we can expect them to take a while to see the data I suppose. I would honestly expect at least some time is needed to think it through. It’s probably not unreasonable to expect - it’s not even been a week.
Perhaps for Unity allowing people to subscribe to Pro with no lock in contract and removing free would work, however if you stop subscribing you can’t build. Or you can build but only to the WebPlayer and Stand alone(But its not to be distributed).