I figure this needs a little more attention.
https://store.unity3d.com/index.html
You get the Android and iOS add-ons for Unity 3 for free (normally $800.00). I just did it and creating the account was really easy and there were no issues getting everything set up. Its a great deal if you were looking to dabble in it.
Thanks for posting this. I don’t really have any plans to do anything on Android or iOS in the near term, but have been toying with the idea of integrating my AI software with Unity, so this may be useful down the road,
Figure it’s like the Amazon app of the day… grab it even if I’m not using it, just in case I want to use it later. :)
I concur with Marcus that setting up the account was hassle free… I was kind of worried that I was gonna have to enter my CC even though the bill was $0, but apparently they thought of that.
Thanks!
Awesome, thanks. I haven’t futzed with Unity, but look forward to it.
got it!!
Oh, useful.
Sends out an email to his games students
8 year old thread but seemed like good as any to post this video.
Unity devs want people to see their software can be as flashy as Unreal.
Unity is making strides in the managing of high end render assets, but it has ways to go. It has definitely shortened the chasm with Unreal, but it’s still not quite there (they need to finish some stuff with their new render pipelines).
It is still significantly cheaper to develop in, though, so for AA games and below it’s now very competitive.
What drives those costs…? I thought they were both free to work with?
Neither of them are free. And as you get into better funded projects, they get more expensive.
Unity has a fixed cost, currently at about $1500 yearly per seat for a mid size studio. Unreal uses a percentage of gross sales royalty that can drive costs up significantly, specially once a publisher gets involved. For bigger projects you are better off going for a one off license, which can be pretty high. Let’s say, for a low budget game you expect to spend 400k and get 800k in sales to break even (store and publisher percentages get reduced). This is a reasonable case for a studio funded game that finds a publisher as a release partner. That would mean an Unreal royalty of 80k, or over 50 Unity seats/year, when for that budget you are looking at probably 10 seats and 15k in costs for Unity. A 65k increase on a 400k project is pretty hefty (you pay after you get the revenue, which is good, but you still pay and the bottom line is a cost for the project and higher chances you don’t break even). For higher budget projects the developer will probably have to get the publisher to pay for engine licenses (since the percentage of royalties the developer gets can be less that the Unreal license itself if the publisher funded the game fully and will recoup in advance -which frequentlymeans the studio getting little money back-), but that can increase publisher’s cost (and project budget) in hundreds of thousands (at that point you are maybe looking at a special single payment license, instead of the public royalty scheme).
Other than that, hiring for Unreal can drive costs significantly vs Unity (much smaller pool of developers with experience, specially in certain markets with little AAA industry) and iteration and implementation can be slower if your game is not a genre that involves real time action, which is Unreal’s structural strength (other stuff is doable, but harder in my experience). Finally, to reap benefit of the very significant advantage of Unreal in terms of performance moving high quality assets and art integration pipeline, you must be able to produce a lot of high quality assets to begin with. Which again, means a higher budget since art is one of the most significant costs of projects at this level.
Unreal is definitely the right choice for most well funded projects, imho, but once you go to lower budgets the picture is murkier and other engines become competitive. Stuff like Bloodstained (for example) I feel would have worked better, been made cheaper and perform better in low level machines like the Switch if they had chosen a different engine.
Interesting, thanks.