Now, your studio must purchase a Professional Edition license for each of the 10 members and suddenly $15,000 is seeming less free than it was before. So imagine that you’re a 10-person studio and you just made an annual gross revenue of $100,000 or more. The Unity 5.X EULA specifically states that only one user is allowed per license. The $1,500 lump sum for a Unity 5 Professional Edition license may seem like a small price to pay if you’ve already earned at least $100,000 on a game you built using Unity, but the devil is in the details. There is a similar rule for commercial and noncommercial entities, but the important takeaway is, if you reached an annual gross revenue of $100,000 or more in the most recently completed fiscal year due to use of the Unity software, then you are no longer allowed to continue use of the Personal Edition.
#Unreal engine 4 cost full#
You may be thinking, if the Personal Edition allows for the full engine, then why don’t studios just take the hit of having a generic splash screen and save on Professional Edition licenses? It seems that the folks at Unity thought that too, because according to the Unity 5.X End User License Agreement (EULA), you may not use the Personal Edition if you are an individual or sole proprietor that has reached annual gross revenue in excess of 100,000 US dollars. The Personal Edition also does not include a customizable splash screen, so if you really must have a customized splash screen rather than the stock Unity splash screen, then you’ll have to fork over $1,500 or $75/month for the Professional Edition of Unity 5. Personal Edition is completely free and includes the engine with all its features as well as royalty free publishing. Unity lists two different pricing options for Unity 5 when used by “Indies & Studios”: Personal Edition and Professional Edition. In this section we’ll take a look at the costs of development and publication using Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4. Let’s start arguably the biggest concern of an indie developer…Īs an independent game developer, your budget is likely very low, if not completely nonexistent. If you already have a favorite game engine that you use dogmatically, then you may learn something new that could potentially change your mind. If you’re a would-be indie game developer and you don’t know which game engine better suits your needs as a developer, then this guide should help you make your decision. By the time you’re done reading this guide, you should know more about the cost of use and scripting of Unity and Unreal, enough so to inform your decision to use one or the other. This guide will walk through the licensing costs and scripting methods found in the aforementioned engines, highlighting the particularities found in each one. These two factors of game development are ones that have been greatly innovated upon in the latest iterations of the Unity and Unreal engines.
Programming has also acted as a barrier of entry for game development. Self-funded games and games with small budgets are the bread and butter of indie games, but development costs hold a tremendous amount of power over whether or not a game is ever made. Game engines like Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) provide the general public with a potential to make great looking games that has historically only been available to industry-proven development studios. We’ve entered an era in game development that is equivalent to the time of the Super 8 camera for film.