I am 19, a student and i need to fork out 1k plus for unity pro and subsequently paying for all the other assets. Sometimes i think why isn’t there any thing like lite. So for people to try out the plugins in the assets store. I am fine with Unity free but assets is a must pay and there isn’t any lite/trial version.
Here’s the kicker: if you can make a game and sell it, you’d be stupid not to upgrade considering everything you get. Best of all, you can use the sales of the game to improve your next game
… correct but I saw a discounted unity for students somewhere…
What I hate is people coming up and saying “I can’t afford it” and giving 1,000 reasons why. You know, there was a time I couldn’t afford it either. So give up smoking. Give up the xbox. Make a game in indie that you can sell to earn pro.
This is for you, not for them your games are just better with pro.
You know i actually sold my xbox and somehow managed to scrape enough money to buy Unity Pro. And i am glad i did it because i earned that investment back within 2 months.
I was not a poor student. I just got downsized from my old job (computer repair shop) and had to go back to live in my parents house. Thanks to Unity i am slowly rebuilding my life and this time i enjoy my work
Anyone who is a student complaining about the price, you should have looked into it. I e-mailed the sales team asking about student discounts. You can get unity Pro, iOS Pro Andriod Pro for £200. Here’s the e-mail I got back with the link to purchase.
Yes we do offer Pro versions of Unity software (Unity Pro, iOS Pro, Android Pro and Asset Server Client license) to verified students.
For more information and to purchase here are some links:
It is possible to obtain Unity Pro on an educational license, but the details vary from region to region.
Nevertheless, sometimes you have to spend money to make money. Investing in good tools and training is an investment in yourself and your career. The apprentices of old would often scrape along for years with only room and board from their masters—much like unpaid internships today—with no guarantee of ever earning their mastery and making a career out of their chosen trade. They invested that time in learning the tools, the craft, the tricks, the inevitable politics, and the basics of running a business.
A college and university education requires the same investment in time, but they also generally expect you to obtain the necessary tools—a PC to work on; expensive textbooks; art reference books, and so on—so not that much has changed. Instead of being taught by a master craftsman with a recognised reputation, you’re taught by masters who might never have actually worked in the real world at all. (This isn’t always the case, but there’s more than a grain of truth in that “those who can, do…” cliché.)
Sound investment pays off in the end, so it’s not money that will be lost, so much as money saved, building interest in the form of better experience (and income) later. You can either choose to pay some money up front to speed up the process, or you can invest more of your time instead. Either way, you are paying for this knowledge. It’s just that students generally have a lot more “disposable” time than “disposable” income, so most tend not to go for the latter.
I remember paying myself tons of games and PC rigs since I was 18 until real dayjob, thanks to summertime jobs.
Age is not a barrier when you really want to achieve something.
A sole summertime job can afford enough to even pay a monster rig, as you don’t have any bill to pay yet, so why not redirecting the investment into Unity pro ?
Very good points all. But ultimately if you intend to stay with unity as a platform, you shouldn’t be looking for freebies. You should be looking as a user base, to inject some money into unity in order to ensure that your investment in the platform pays off in the long term. It all depends how serious you are.
What n0mad says is quite interesting and very true. In today’s age, software is actually worth more than hardware. Having a monster rig is fine for impressing friends and fluid framerates, but it still won’t enable you to create your dreams to their full potential without the software.
For student versions you may still be restricted, for example:
It’s not a magic bullet but it is hugely cheap and may well benefit genuine students.
Oh wow. I didn’t know that. About emailing them for discount. I wasn’t trying to say that’s the reason i won’t buy i mean if people can afford it and i will of course encourage and will do so myself to buy the pro license. Firstly to support the Unity developers for all the hard work and well Unity is just the best game engine i have come across.
To me for now a free license will suffice but when i do get a stable pay. I will sure get a License. I guess Unity will be the best investment ever compared to spending tons of money on 3d softwares which imo is much expensive and useless for me.
You know, I have never felt the need to email them directly. Usually, when I hit a snag, I do a google search and end up at a small handful of sites that has enough guidance that I muddle through it. As a last resort, I post in one of hte forums and usually get a couple of replies within a day. It didn’t even occur to me to email them… /boggle.
Here’s my two complaints of Unity:
The documentation is pretty good, but is lacking in decent examples sometimes. I don’t want full working games as examples, I just want little snippets related to whatever I’m trying to understand.
The biggest weakness of Unity scripting is that it relies on external .net and mono sites that don’t always translate easily.Take List, Dictionary, ArrrayList, etc… Trying to figure these things out can be difficult. They work, but the syntax is sometimes obscure (try to use a dictionary of lists for instance)…
For the most part though, I love working in Unity. I’m coming from an open source game engine that I have used for years. Simply put, I can do stuff in Unity faster, easier, and with less code. And, because I can use Unityscript, I can usually code up stuff that is quite complex in a matter of hours. Including interactions with external databases and everything.
I would buy pro if I thought that it was worth the money for me, but as some of the selling points for pro are: water, shadows, and image effects. Not that I don’t want those but I would rather have some other features like a high level language like ruby or python or voxels or more speed. Not that I think that those should be in pro, but the shadows for instance if I had pro I would make my own to have more control and custom tailor it to fit my game. I am not tying to say that you should not buy it but to make sure you need it to make better games. I don’t need it right now but latter who knows I might buy it, as for the rest of you I would recommend you to buy it easy games for iphone and ipad great!
even if you price a game at about $10 (which is about standard for most indie titles on steam) you only need to sell 150-200 before you can afford the full version (this is assuming that there aren’t other costs like additional assets and the like.) and given that Union and Steam and all those other services that will put your stuff “out there” to be seen and purchased means increased market exposure, the only thing one has to be able to do is keep working at it and be content with the indie license while you’re working on it.
only problem with all that is that is assuming that the game being made has enough polish to be appealing and play well enough that word-of-mouth will eventually spread… which means more market exposure which leads to more revenue… etc
Boo is similar to Python. Pro also has: Profiler, rendertextures, movietextures, occlusion culling, deferred rendering, streaming, audio filters, and some other things. It’s not just shadows and image effects.
If you’re good enough to make your own shadow system, you can certainly handle voxels, and you don’t need Pro for that.
