Back on topic from my big price comparison though... Unity still has the free version to lure in no-risk hobby users, and $1500 a year is probably too much money for most people to spend on a hobby... but it's a perfectly acceptable tax expense for a business, and really dedicated hobbyists :lol:

If hobby users have no money to spend, then Unity wants to keep them around by offering the free version (and Unreal by being free until after sales), so as to keep a user base. Unreal's business model obviously gives them the bigger freeloader user-base, which is a good thing. Going to subscriptions would destroy that for them. Even if these people don't create monetary value for you, they create value through content, tutorials, forum posts, etc, etc...

It's also telling that one of the features that you get by giving money to Unity is the ability to hide the "made in Unity" splash screen. That splash screen has a connotation of "low quality", and people pay to avoid it! On the other hand, "made in Unreal" is still a badge of honour. Their brand is much stronger :D

I don't see Unreal going back to a monthly subscription. Unity makes money off all the people who are trying to make games (or contracting on them), whereas Unreal makes money off game sales. Apparently both business models are working for them.

Seeing how many staff Unreal has, and how many damn features exist in their engine compared to Unity, it's possible that Unreal's business model is working even better than Unity's! I showed above that for non-hobby users, Unreal is far more expensive... but it's justified in being more expensive because it's offering so much more.

Speaking of contractors above -- in my local indie scene, I know a lot of people who work on people's games as non-permanent contractors, and who use their own Unity license to do so, instead of being provided a license by the company they're working for. In that field of work, having your own pro subscription paid up is pretty much a prerequisite to get the job. As above, $1.5k is a pretty acceptable professional expense there too.

I can't see the USD price, but when I look at the subscription page for Autodesk Maya, it's AU$2272 (~US$1700), or the Adobe suite is ~AU$700 (~US$500) -- and it's expected that a 3D art contractor would have these kind of subscriptions as a professional expense too. So Unity is definitely targeting businesses from large to small to independent contractors here, and is very cheap for that market. For everyone else, they've got their free version, which will be fine for some games, and way too crippled for others :(

Unity charges for a darker editor UI skin.

Even if you're just a windows only developer, so you've suffered a price increase... assuming you're doing gamedev as a full-time job, Unity is still far cheaper than Unreal...

Care to elaborate?
Given that not every developer out there will make millions in revenue, yet Unity charges a flat cost PER SEAT, I think this not something where you can make a broad statement like.
Sure, still Unity is cheaper for many devs in the lower ends of the revenue scale. It certainly is cheaper for devs that are moving into the higher regions of revenue. Yet there are many scenarios, especially in the lower end revenue area, where Unreals model just makes more sense.

FAR cheaper is too strong a word unless you are getting into territory where you NEED to pay for a full Unreal license to avoid paying through the nose for those royalities.

I made the assumption that you're doing it as a full-time job -- not an "indie dev" who does it part time as an expensive hobby, but an "indie dev" as in self employed businessman who does it to pay their mortgage and feed and clothe their children, or pay their rent and fund their vacation savings account.

Below is the transition point where one is cheaper than the other, given some more assumptions:

A "starving artist" indie dev has expenses of about 30k a year, which with ~30% income tax we'll say is $43k gross. That'll cover their San Francisco sharehouse and their hipster coffee habit.

An "average developer" in the US expects a salary of $80k a year. They've quit their job at EA because they want to actually profit from their work instead of some executive earning millions.

They're making a Windows game and selling on Steam, who take a 30% cut.

The aim is to break even, by making at retail the salary cost divided by 0.7 in order to cover Steam's cut... but the cost of the engine isn't taken into account yet.

Unreal takes 5% of the retail price. Unreal also gives you a $3k threshold per quarter, but we're going to assume that your game gets 95% of it's sales within the first month of launch, and I'm ignoring the 5% "tail" sales that would extend into the next quarter - so I'm only applying that threshold once per game. In reality, if you're making less than one game per quarter, the threshold will apply to your "tail" sales too, so you'll save a bit more than what I've shown here.

Unity costs $125 multiplied by number of staff and number of months.

The table below is the cost of the engine, given that you've made your sales target of barely enough to cover owed wages.

e.g. 2 "average" devs for 12 months is $160k. Unity costs a flat $3k, but the retail take in order to earn that $160k is ~$229k, so Unreal's 5% is ~$11, minus the $3k threshold, which comes to $8428. So in that situation (shown at the 12 month, average, 2 staff cells), Unity is $5k cheaper.

Orange situations have Unreal as the cheapest option, blue situations have Unity as the cheapest option.

Unreal is only really cheaper in the cases where you don't expect to make a (USA) respectable wage, and either are a lone starving artist, or a group of them pumping out a new game every quarter... or where you're not actually running a business, and are just making games as a hobby. In almost every other situation, Unity is far cheaper.

And "millions in revenue" isn't actually all that much for an independent game these days. If 8 experienced developers want to quit their jobs spend a full year making a game, then $1M at retail is probably around their "break even" point. With minimal expenses (it's likely they'd have spent considerable money on rent, HW, SW, utilities, marketing, exhibiting at PAX, etc...), they'd make about $80k each, which is the average US gamedev salary. Given the huge likelyhood that they fail to make any money at all, it's a much safer bet to just keep their jobs and not "go indie" :(

Okay, that was quite an exquisite answer... thanks for taking your time and creating that chart. Would give you a +1 if I could.

Yes, my gut feeling was right, but I guess I miscalculated the exact point at which the balance shifted in Unitys favor wrong. Or I should have calculated instead of just guessing ;)

Anyway, really, I am not against a higher price as long as the hike is not enormous (like the 400% hike of the pro sub for one specific use case), and the money is put to good use (to be seen. Unity, your move)...

I don't dislike subs as such, as long as the dev is healthy (Unity AFAIK is), and has a track record of not screwing over their userbase (unlike Adobe for example).

I also fall into the "I prefer buying, not renting" category.

However, I do like Office 365's rental scheme, since I can install the full suite on five family computers for only $100 a year (read: $80 a year if you buy via Amazon). That actually works out to only slightly more than I used to pay, and has the added benefit of free upgrades when new office versions are released (like Office 2016, which I promptly chose to upgrade to on some devices but not others).

My only beef is apparently I can't add Visio to my subscription unless I create a separate business account w/ subscription (but I have full Office365 desktop installs for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, and Outlook).

Unity charges for a darker editor UI skin.

Those capitalist monsters. :angry:

Seems like the ones complaining the most were really never affected by the price change. The indies who are never actually going to release anything still get to use it for free. Everybody else realizes that renting/buying software is part of the cost of doing business.

Those capitalist monsters. :angry:

It's an odd contrast, offering all that technology (the engine core, graphics, physics engines etc.) at no cost with the free version, and then setting a 'darker editor UI' as the feature that convinces you to pay money, especially in a capitalist point of view.

It's an odd contrast, offering all that technology (the engine core, graphics, physics engines etc.) at no cost with the free version, and then setting a 'darker editor UI' as the feature that convinces you to pay money, especially in a capitalist point of view.

It's not really any different than the MOBA economy running entirely on optional cosmetic items. People drop cash on strange status symbols.

As a pro owner i never used the dark theme lol.

Generally speaking I'm against renting my tools instead of buying them.

From the Unity3d FAQ:

If you subscribe to the new Unity Pro for a minimum of 24 consecutive months, you get to keep the version you have if you notify us that you are stopping your subscription, and choosing pay to own. At that point, you will stop receiving access to Pro tier services, new features and upgrades. You will receive the next 3 patches. We reserve the right to grant access to additional patches in the event that we find severe bugs. If you later resume subscribing, you will still own the perpetual license you elected but again start receiving updates, fixes and services. Once you have subscribed for another 24 consecutive months, and should you then elect to cease this new subscription, you will then be granted a new perpetual license of the then current version of Unity.

Generally speaking I'm against renting my tools instead of buying them.

From the Unity3d FAQ:

If you subscribe to the new Unity Pro for a minimum of 24 consecutive months, you get to keep the version you have if you notify us that you are stopping your subscription, and choosing pay to own. At that point, you will stop receiving access to Pro tier services, new features and upgrades. You will receive the next 3 patches. We reserve the right to grant access to additional patches in the event that we find severe bugs. If you later resume subscribing, you will still own the perpetual license you elected but again start receiving updates, fixes and services. Once you have subscribed for another 24 consecutive months, and should you then elect to cease this new subscription, you will then be granted a new perpetual license of the then current version of Unity.

I'm sure I read on their site that they are doing away with that from 2017. They could have backtracked though...