Unity iOS and Android Basic licenses FREE until April 8th

Personally, I make much more money through iOS development than I make through anything else. Frankly. you sound like you're in need of a tin-foil hat with your conspiracy theories and predictions of global fallout. They're giving away the free version of iOS and Android for the same reason they gave away the old indie version. Because it gets them shedloads of new customers who invest a lot of time learning to use their tools and inevitably pay for Pro licenses, and persuade others to do the same. It help put Torque out of business, it's put a lot of pressure on tools like Corona and Shiva, and it's even gaining them ground on Epic.

 

While Basic programming skills might be easy to come by, exceptional game design skills are not. That's still what separates the lucky ones from the unlucky ones IMO

 

Pros - Build to iOS and android for free
Cons - Not free if you find it after April 8th.

 

This is not a "crisis" call.

Look at it this way....10000 people download these free licenses (me included) , 10% begin to make a serious game. In 2 months Unity announces Unity 4.0 and then the price to upgrade those licenses is a couple hundred dollar...see where I am going!? Do you think they make most of their money from license purchases or license upgrade fees?

 

Heck if I make enough money from the android ports of my games I will surely upgrade to Pro. Before I was not willing to even take that risk.

 

Cons:
- 4.0 will probably come sooner than later.
- No GUI System in the 3.x branch since it would not make sense giving it now.
- More Noise to filter trough (IOS / Android Forums)
- Leaving the current customers in the dust, (nice for new people, but bad for current customers)

Pros:
- More market share for unity (increased reputation + increased revenue)
- More users (with new viewpoints)

It personally does not impact me either way.

 

I really don't know why all that talk here...man it's free!!!let's develop our games

 

Lucas, have you put the free version on your computer. My question is will it work with Unity free 3.5. I am especially interested with the Android package.

 

Yes, it will work with free.

 

Yes it may be against the Developer agreement, but if you haven't paid the $100 and agreed to it yet, I think you could do that without any trouble. It wouldn't be the best way to do it, but if you haven't agreed anywhere not to, then you aren't bound to anything. It would be like writing iOS home-brew.

 

8 years ago mac used PPC, unity dosent run on these.

 

lol... frankly you sound quite a conspiracy yourself.


In every case, this is one tweet from UT CEO David Helgason explaining the strategy: "We want to dominate more better. Unity's already used more than any other technology, and we want to have 100s of 1000s of users".

Ok then, good luck and thank you again UT!

 

Why only to April 8th ?

The cat is out of the bag, so why not extend this until Unity 4.0 if they really want to gain members into the hundred's of thousands and please compensate those that should be.

They should just get rid of basic paid license altogether!

 

I think this free Android and iOS basic license is targetting to pull in people and to show: "look what we have"... marketing to prevent switches from Unity to UDK

 

I reckon depending on popularity of the download they will probably keep it free. It's way too risky right now for them to say IT'S FREE FOREVER. If it fails they can't say oh wait no we changed our mind. So they say it's free for a limited time so if they do decide to keep it free, they have the option to.

 

Thats because probably one of the free campaign reasons is to get more people on board and get them later to upgrade to 4.0 with a small fee. Its basic marketing that has happened before too (?).

 

Most excellent! Mass Effect 3 can wait, I really need to start coding now!

 

Thanks! Team UT.

Reactivation doesn't work for me. Unity freezes with 44-69% CPU. Waited far longer than the 5-10 minutes adviced.
Tried yesterday and today. Is this because the Activation server is about to go SuperNova?
Should I activate manually, keep trying, or wait a couple of days/weeks/months ?

 

It did the same thing for me, I thought it was frozen and killed the program in task manager a couple times because it froze the entire program, but eventually after 20+ minutes it finalized.

 

+ in marketing it's better if you tell the customer that it's for a limited time,

 

Maybe THE plan is just push asset store to its limits untill the release of unity 4 and see if it worth giving away the free mobile licenses, as effect, last time they did something like this, garagegames went out in practice, this time it will kill several of new niche game engine that was targeting mobile devices and probably we'll see stonetrip having the same fate of garagegames, and it will include others not so known, as papaya mobile, cuttlefish, dx studio and so on, all the ones having just the slogan: "Ok, Unity is better, but we are cheaper". Being the most used engine on the market, and almost an standard, may worth the price of a bunch of basic licenses in the long run as long they will attract a lot of talented developers and their companies.

 

Btw, this is the best time to become an asset store developer...

 

Agreed...

 

Also best time to have a sale.

http://www.assetstoremadness.com/

 

Im quite certan that Unity makes most off its money from selling Unity IOS basic licences, its proboly just because they are about to relese Unity 4 then these are going to be redundent(kind of but still usable) i dont think they are ever going to make IOS and Android basic for free.

 

I disagree. I think unity makes most of their money with the educational, source code, and pro licenses. Let's not forget about the various larger developer that (i think) use unity. If larger companies use Unity, it's obvious they are going to to go pro. A lot of them will also buy the source code license along with it. Of course, that's assuming the source code license is bought in the first place.

They may release Android and iOS basic for free permanently, but that will depend on many, many factors. I can see them having more sales like this in the future.

 

I doubt it, i think that big companies proboly make up 15% pro proboly 30% basic 40% other stuff 5%.

The console licences only sell for like $20,000(i think) and hardly any console games are made using it, i guess source is the same(hardly any sell i guess it costs ~$500,000)... loads of pro users are around, but still so many are hobby game devs so they get cheap licences.

 

I waited for over an hour a couple of times :

I'll try again sometime next week. Usually we have to wait a bit longer for the really goods things in life to materialize. So no worries.

 

If the company made more than 100k US$ in the last fiscal year they must have only pro licenses, that means, they can't mix licenses... Unless they are not following the rules...

http://unity3d.com/unity/unity-end-user-license-3.x

The free version of Unity may not be licensed by a commercial entity with annual gross revenues (based on fiscal year) in excess of US$100,000, or by an educational, non-profit or government entity with an annual budget of over US$100,000.

 

That isent my meaning, i ment this:

Unity source+console = 15%
Unity pro makes up 30%
Unity basic makes 40%
Other stuff makes 5%

Of all unitys income, thats just my prediction and i have no evidance to think it is right.

 

Oh, I see, sorry, I was confused...

I want to talk a little bs here aswell...

3 ways to compensate: educational licenses, pro and asset store.

Huge user base = more educational licenses sales.

More educational licenses sales = big companies hires unity specialists = more pro sales + more premium support.

Huge user base also implies in more asset store sales. Let's do the math for asset store:

One mobile basic license = $400

Each asset store sales UT takes 30%, so, if we want to know how much in asset store sales unity needs to make to earn the same as one basic mobile license sell we do:

X*0.3=400 =>
X = 400/0.3 =>
X = 1 333.

So UT now needs to make US$ 1333 in asset store sales to earn US$ 400, so they may lost money in the begining with this freemium model because they are relying in asset store, but in the long run, if the user base becomes huge it will increase the quantity of asset store sales+educational licenses+pro licenses+premium service, and may reach the point to compensate the lost of basic mobile sales. If the quantity and quality of asset store itens increase they could reach that point sooner than later. This is a risk move, but they can afford to test it now because they will release 4.0 in a few months, this is the time they need to confirm if they continue with this strategy or go back with the old model. I believe this is the main reason they haven't confirmed yet if this free mobile licenses will continue in 4.0.

Plus there are other advantages of having a huge user base in itself...

If it becomes popular in Scandinavia countries, they'll sell a lot for educational entities and companies, because it's relative cheap, support in scandinavia also costs a lot, one small ticket that could be solved in less than one hour could cost to a companie the same as one mobile basic license, plus they could have some price fixed deals to implement some features or something like that.

@titanty

So, even if you are right, that are not static variables, if they change the model they could change the % of each item and actually earns more...

As I said, all guesses and bs, business is a serious stuff, they need to have mustache to do some moves, for sure they have a lot of data to support this decision that we don't know a S*** and can be completely unrelated to what I or you guess.

 

Come on, making up numbers out of thin air isn't going to get you very far unless you have some sort of method for coming up with those numbers...

I can guarantee you are 99.9999% wrong.

 

Unity iOS basic shows up grey on the unity store. So how is it possible to download basic?

 

Lol, did you select the Your version of Unity? Select either Unity Basic or Unity Pro and it won't be grey anymore.

 

edit, nevermind iOS export shows up now.

 

Did you accidentally activate as basic unity instead of clicking the activate button next to the serial area?

 

It sounds like something you're overlooking. I don't remember how the activation process goes, even though I just activated the andoid and iOS licenses not too long ago. Did you use the internet or manual activation?

 

Basically the problem was when I selected internet activation( opening the web page for serial number) didn't work the first time. So had to relaunch unity 3.5 using internet activation again worked. Maybe this weekend I'll try to search for some tutorials that work with it.

 

Many thanks Keely, i was blind but now i see - planing to purchase that in the next week RageSpline+PlayMaker
BTW Unity just roked my world with iOS and Android basic licences for free - Now i'm back on streets

 

Hey there guys,

so i "bought" the iOs and Android license today for free
I downloaded my Unity 3.5 Version last week and today the iOS and Android AddOn. So i got a Serial-Number which i typed in, but it kinda didn't chance anything within Unity. How can i see clearly i got now the access to iOs and Android Development. There wasn't a window something like: "Mate, you just unlocked iOS and Android Development!"
I looked up in "Unity > About" and checked the license, well there i saw it's for PC/MAc Standalone, iOS and Android, but my Unity didn't even shut down and did a reboot. I thought i had to install something?

 

No, you don't have to install anything. It just unlocks features.

 

Do you need certs to post onto android after getting this free license? if so does anyone have any information on how about I would do that. I'm interested in porting fully.


Thanks Unity for the licenses!

 

If you look under "File" -> "Build Settings", you should be able to select iOS and Android now. I think that's the only way to really tell.

 

free free fee! great. I want my $400 back.

 

Make a good game, and you'll earn it back through sales

 

I don't mind suddenly receiving two mobile engines at half price so much, but wasn't there supposed to be a mail with some discounts or something for those of us who bought one of them in the month before?

 

Could you just add IOS and Android license only to cart, without buying new pro unity or free unity license?
I tried to activate serialno. and found that pro interface (black color) was changed back to free interface (gray color). IOS and Android export is available, but this is free unity3d license, not my pro unity3d license.
Then I tried to activate serialno. of unity3d pro again. IOS and Android export are removed.

Any idea?
How to add free IOS and Android license to existing unity3d pro?

@c-Row: Are you sure that you are running unity3d pro, not unity3d free?

 

Yes, there's a big blue "upgrade" link at the top of the store page, it takes you to a page that lets you upgrade your license instead of making a new one.

 

Thanks. I thought I have problem with my upgrade link and contacted unity support.

 

I am pretty sure I am not running Unity3D Pro. Well, not yet, but the Missus told me I am not allowed to spend a grand on the Pro license until my game looks good enough, so I am still on Free.