Unity 2.6 is out (and free!)

[bloodtiger10]

yea! time to install this on all my computers all 3

[briancarroll]

[Discord]

[Robz]

UNITY PLEASE RECONSIDER

Before anyone flames please conciser there are two main points of view in the forum, first UNITY free is great value “How can you not see that” and secondly I know UNITY free is great value and I can see that, BUT I was a paid customer who has lost money “how can you not see that”

I agree unity free is great for the greater good of man, however i fall into the second school of thought

points

1.Refund to those within 60 days (GREAT)
2.Discount for those out of the 60 days for unity iphone or pro (GREAT)
3.Nothing for those out of the 60 days with unity indie and iphone basic (who do not want pro) NOT SO GOOD
4.Unity free is great and its value can not be questioned from version 2.6

Would you (UNITY) conciser giving the same deal to customers outside the 60 days who already have unity indie and/or iphone basic. I am not suggesting a cash refund rather credit towards any product they purchase or upgrade with Unity Technologies.

E.G. A Unity Indie license “owner” has been offered Iphone Basic for $150, however if a Unity Indie license owner already has Iphone Basic credit their account with the same discount, effectively making the renewal of the Iphone Basic version 2 = $150.

This will have no financial implications on Unity Technologies within the current version and will also improver customer retention between versions.

PS I know there are other combinations, but the basic idea remains the same across all.

[jashan]

[simonre]

I bought an Apple Personal LaserWriter years ago and it cost a small fortune. Still works but now - get this - the equivalent is almost free! Do you think Apple will give me a refund as I paid a lot of money for it years ago? And the Volvo... don't get me started. Thousands...

I have Unity indie and iphone basic - no chance of me going to Pro this year (even if I hide the credit card bills). My request would be, can I swap the $400 discount on the pro version for a Unity mug? (no pun intended)

BTW: all good.

[Slayer5150]

[seventhsynergy]

[bloodtiger10]

guys just stop complaining please. I mean just be happy that if you have indie you won't have to pay for the 3.0 upgrade and I mean they could of made you guys pay for 2.6 so I mean just get over it. There is no point to ths you are just waiting your time.

*ducks and runs before objects start being throw at him and people start flaming*

I know this may sound a bit harsh but I mean if they didn't do this you'll have to pay for 3.0 and 4.0 and so on but your purchase saved you those costs and over time as unity matures you will actually make a profit from this (well save more money then you paid for). so I mean yeah if you got untiy 62 days ago sure complain but I mean UT is being very very very generous even to offer a refund.

[David Helgason]

Thanks for the support, and sorry that we've not been back to respond to this thread faster. The Unity Developer Conference just wrapped up and everyone was first busy, then busy and exhausted.

Then, since company is spread out over 5+ offices all around the world and we only get together a couple of times per year, we spent Saturday in a few all-hands sessions (doing a post-mortem of the Unity 2.6 release and other company discussions), and ended up with a group photo and a group dinner.

Today I've spent the last couple of hours reading up on the forum reactions. Overwhelmingly the forums (and the rest of the web, and twitter) are positive. Thank you for that, and we are very excited too.

But there's also some people who are frustrated or upset. Some questions have simply gone unanswered for too long and I'll address those here and then be available for further discussion.

What is harder for me to swallow is that a lot second-guessing about our motives and future decisions has happened, with some really pessimistic guesses.

In the past we've always tried to be as nice to our users, including a 5 month free upgrade window from Unity 1.x to 2.x, very reasonable pricing when going from 1.x to 2.x, and always making sure that Unity Indie (and now plain Unity) are commercially viable licenses allowing hobbyists and indies to actually make money from their work. There's so much to do in the future, but we intend to stay our course and stay true to our vision of empowering a very broad range of people to do great things.

Will I still be able to upgrade to Unity Pro for $1300 after December 31st?

This question had most worried. It arose because of some unfortunate wording and because of the fact that our website isn't ready for when the extra offer expires (don't worry, we'll get there).

The answer is that we will naturally honor the $199 you originally paid towards an upgrade to Unity Pro 2.x. The offer that was sent out was for an additional $200 towards the upgrade if done this year.

Will Unity get worse support because of this?

It is entirely possible that our support can have some congestion from time to time. But overall this will be net positive for us. A much larger base of knowledgeable developers who know Unity are around now, and there's more and more tutorials, scripts that are shared on the unifycommunity.com wiki, and now even a book. The amazing thing about knowledge is, that like software, it scales well: more people consuming it don't make it run out.

But we know that with a scaling userbase, more resources are required. And we have them. On the one hand we've recently launched answers.unity3d.com to help out (we plan more "software solutions" over time), and on the other we've recently hired a full time employee Andy Stark aka Andeeee to make sure that these forums are well tended, and that hard questions get answered by our best engineers (not to mention that many of our old hands still spend time here too).

Will Unity Indie users now be treated like non-paying users?

Strictly speaking, yes. But we don't intend to tier our users into two (or more) groups, just as we've never previously tiered people into Unity Pro and Unity Indie users.

In our interactions with our users we usually don't ask which license do you use, and we like people based on how nice and cool they are, and how much the bring to the community. For example we were big fans of Emil Johansen aka AngryAnt's AI work (as well as great community presence) and never minded that he "only" owned a Unity Indie license. In the end we hired him because he'd become an expert in Unity.

Will more users of Unity somehow devalue the product?

It's been a while since Unity was really an exclusive thing, yet I remember when there were just a few dozen users and we celebrated (with bread and water) for each new one. Before we launched Unity 2.6 and free Unity we had over 13,000 users all over the world, and though we have a lot more now we're still under 100,000

But as has been stated by many in the thread above, the value of Unity has been increasing over time, all the while the price has dropped we kept improving the product, adding features and optimizing the engine (we originally charged $249 for Unity Indie, then for a long time we charged $199, and now $0).

This spring we added Windows deployment as a free new feature, and with Unity 2.6 this week we added a beautiful animation system plus lots of smaller but lovely additions. Also everything is around 20% faster now (and this isn't the first time we improve speed by a substantial factor either).

But the most important thing is this: when we started out, anyone adopting Unity was at a disadvantage. Not because of Unity itself, but because of other's perception of it. Game publishers would go "Unity what?" if you mentioned the engine, or maybe just "risky!" Web portals would say "an unproven plugin?". No prospective employer would recognize that your "Unity experience" was valuable. And recruiting for a Unity position or a Unity based hobbyist team would be all but impossible.

We've worked very hard, and today using Unity is an advantage. People know that big companies have "risked" projects with Unity, and that therefore it's safe to use on even large projects. The plugin has a distribution going on 20 million. Dozens of companies are searching for people with solid Unity experience. And although finding someone for your team who knows Unity is still hard (these people are in demand!), it'll only get easier from here.

Why such a big discount towards Unity iPhone Basic?

This is one that can be sliced several different ways. What we wanted to achieve was to offer Unity Indie owners something meaningful. In both cases the staring point was that we wanted to start with crediting the original purchase of $199 towards an upgrade. That meant that the Unity Pro upgrade would be $1300 and that the Unity iPhone Basic upgrade would be $200. Then we wanted to add something on top of that. In the case of Unity Pro that was $200 and in the case of Unity iPhone Basic that was $50. That's 15% on Unity Pro and 25% on Unity iPhone Basic. Nothing earth-shattering, but also not insignificant for most people.

Of course this can be (and has been in this thread) sliced any number of ways (one way of calculating it had the Unity iPhone Basic offer being 4x larger than the Unity Pro one). It's hard to make everyone happy at the same time, but at the very least and importantly: one way or another, everyone involved is better off today than a week ago.

How could you take my money when you knew Unity Indie would be free?

Actually the final decision to make a free license was taken less than 60 days ago. The idea was much older of course (it's a question that any software developer asks himself at some point), but we honestly didn't feel sure that was the right decision until recently.

When is Unity 3.0 coming?

Official answer: no comment. True answer: we don't know. We're working hard as always, and have lots of important stuff in development. What is certain that it's more than a few months out, and that we'll be reasonable when it comes to upgrades and pricing.


Be nice to each other, and all the best from a quiet evening in San Francisco.

[briancarroll]

[AaronC]

Great post David, thank you very much.

I feel very priviledged to have seen Unity grow so much, I was onboard for the 1.2 release, and seeing that latest competition thread fully blows me away with what people can do.

Keep up the good work.

AaronC

[jashan]

Awesome posting, David - I hope that clarifies things for everyone! I really enjoyed Unite 2009 and am looking forward already to Unite 2010 (back in Europe? ). And to celebrate the day, I just thought it would be cool to pull out my all-time favorite thread in this forum:

Overcome with Emotion *Weep* - for all those new folks to get a bit of the good old spirit of these forums. And mind you: That was originally related to Unity 1.6 - a looohng time ago: one full major version (we're at 2.6 now), and more than 2.5 years (btw, that was about the time when I found out about Unity but at that time I didn't have a Mac so it took until 2.0 for me to paddle into that wave ).

Greetings from "the one who swims with the dolphins" (this morning - yeeeha! - they were there), currently chillin' out on Hawaii

[.Tom.]

Thanks for the reply, David.
Feeling better now.

[highscores]

Agreed, thanks for the reply.