Unity Engine 5 Goes Free

Yesterday Unreal announced they are offering Unreal Engine 4 for a 5% royalty fee only payable when quarterly sales reach $3,000 per quarter. This isn’t just the engine they are offering. It is sample projects, asset packs, and tutorials.

Today I am seeing they are releasing Unity Engine 5. So, if your tired and haven’t eaten, like me and confuse Unreal and Unity, it starts to make sense why they would release a free older version. Still pretty awesome. But, not so awesome after food and a nap.

But………..  there is a Personal Edition and a Pro Edition of Unity Engine 5. The Personal Edition is FREE, no royalty. However, if your game nets sales of US$100,000 then you are expected to upgrade to Pro ($75/month), which at that point should be no problem. 

Quoting from the Unity 5 announcement:

Unity 5 Personal Edition

Democracy is something we believe in. It’s in the DNA of those that work at Unity. It’s one of the things that drew me to the company. It’s also one of the things that is most important to the games industry. So with that in mind, we are launching Unity 5 Personal Edition. Unity 5 Personal Edition provides all the power of Unity 5 engine and editor. To clarify — this is important — it is the same Unity 5 engine and editor as in the Pro Edition.  It comes with all the features including  Profiler, Occlusion Culling, Render-to-Texture, and Post-Processing Special Effects as well as all the big Unity 5 features like Physically-based Shading, Enlighten, reflection probes and much more.

Unity 5 Personal Edition is free.  No royalty.  Free.

Unity 5 Personal Edition is for professional developers, Indies, hobbyists and studios with revenue under $100,000 and funding under $100,000.

3 thoughts on “Unity Engine 5 Goes Free

  1. \Today I am seeing they are releasing Unreal Engine 5. So, it starts to make since why they would release a free older version. Still pretty awesome.\

    Um… I think you got that mixed up with Unity 5, because there’s no Unreal Engine 5. Only the 4th, which is the one they released for free.

  2. There’s a tiny issue with Unity Pro licensing costs that is commonly overseen [overlooked], tho:
    The 1500/75$ actually mark the cost for a single user, single machine license, plus, if you want to go mobile, add another license per architecture, user and machine (only Windows Phone is free, afaik). So if you’re working in a team and want to go cross-platform, the 5% royality for Unreal suddenly sounds like a damn good deal…

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