The unity game engine has just gone free for all individual mobile game developers of Android and iOS. A product which previously had a license cost of around $400, becoming free is a big move for the development community and is enough to spur development of mobile games in its direction for these mobile platforms. While the product was free for individual developers earlier too, it supported deployment only to desktop platforms like PC, Mac and the Web. Now only those corporate organizations with a turnover in excess of $100,000 will be required to use the paid product. Unity Pro licenses cost almost $1500 per license for such users.
David Helgason CEO of the Unity 3D team says in the official blog post, “In the coming months, we will make Blackberry 10 and Windows Phone 8 deployment available to everyone all over the planet on those exact same terms. Completely free of charge.” He also said that there were no hidden charges or royalty fees attached with the new announcement. The new features for deployment to mobile platforms can now be accessed by simply updating the Unity software to the latest version.
While this might have come as a shock to many developers who have purchased the plugins for deployment to these mobile platforms, Unity has said that they will be reaching out to those people who have made purchases in the last 30 days and offering discounts and rebates if they wish to purchase the Pro license. With this new pricing model, it is clear that Unity will be able to lower the entry barrier for beginning developers to a much lower level so that anyone can start developing Unity based games. This will not only promote development for talented individual developers who are often short on resources, but will also ensure that Unity is able to hopefully earn more, provided that Unity based development takes up steam due to the changed pricing model.
amazing