A bit late to party (hum....) but I just saw that the game engine Unity will soon drop the perpetual license option (1.500$ as a one-time payment) to only keep the subscriptions services.

they're will be different tiers:

Personal: Free
Plus : 35$/month/seat
Pro : 125$/month/seat
Enterprise: on demand

For people who bought a perpetual license to Unity 5, the version updates will stop after 3 March 2017. For further updates you'll have to subscribe.

There's also a "pay to own" option which seems sketchy (copy-paste):
"Along with the new subscription model, we are introducing “pay to own”. After having paid for 24 months of subscription, you can stop paying and keep on using the version you have at that point. Of course, you would also stop getting new features, services or fixes; choice is yours."

If you're doing work for third-parties and they require "no Unity splash-screen", you'll have to get the Pro tier at 125$/month/seat as the Plus tier doesn't have this option.

Here's the original blog post with the features and prices for each tiers:
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/05/31/new-products-and-prices/
The follow-up post:
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/06/05/subscription-why/
The FAQ:
http://unity3d.com/unity/faq/4520

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So do you plan using Unity "professionally" afterwards? Will you switch to another engine? Or completely change your work field (like working with Adobe CC)?

Clarification: $125/month/seat "with one year commitment", whatever that means. Most people who have to buy their own Pro license don't have a reliable stream of third-party jobs to justify the purchase. This is ass.

This is probably going to kill off Unity as the engine of choice for all these low-rent projects that keep flooding Groupees, itch.io and Steam. And that in my eyes is actually a good thing - not only is Unity an obnoxiously poor engine in its own right, it is responsible for around 90% of the shovelware that is being spammed over most PC distribution sites nowadays.

I'm usually filled with a sense of dread when I see that stock Unity config tool, even more so when I see "Made with Unity Personal Edition". Rarely have I been pleasantly surprised.

I'm personally an SDL fan myself for lower-level development, but then I don't do much 3D.

Just one more reason not to bother with Unity... kind of glad now I never managed to get into it properly.

But I do agree that if it slows or stops the flow of PC shovelware that can only be a good thing.

Yup, you have to buy a kind of one-year "membership" so that makes 1.500$/year while with the perpetual license, the 1.500$ bill was strectched across more than 2 years between two version of Unity. It actually won't (or only a very small quantity) as the Free version will still be available in its current state which means:

- Unity splashscreen
- No performance reporting (it works a bit like windows task manager but for optimization purposes)
- No dark skin for the editor (yeah, it's purely cosmetic)

Those aren't enough to drawback individuals or companies who wants to flood the market. You have to get back to the era of Unity V4 which had a way more "crippled" free version (and thus incentivizing more to get the pro version).

I agree. Its on the same shelf as Gamemaker. I had a look at it years back when it first came to PC, and it was ok, easy enough workflow, uses C#. Then they rapidly grew in size and this move has been on the cards for quite some time - they introduced pay per month a year or so back as an option. I looked at it on and off, but it really ramped up the asset store, and the online part to much for me so never got anywhere with. Its a shame really as the engine is really aimed at indies, individuals.

Currently I am learning Godot, which is free and seems pretty easy. Looked at various ones over the years, I always found either there wasn't enough documentation, or it was too focused on arty people moving things around in editors (I am a programmer), so with the loss of XNA (yeah ok, mongame is there but was avoiding as they still used XNA build pipeline) and this, its really back to looking at engines/middleware again. There is also lumberyard and UE4 personally I see them as far to big/complicated and needing to much for a 1 person operation.

When ever I see Subscription or cloud based service, my skin crawls. I just don't get customers buying into this very short term saving. its usually only cheaper if you use the software for less than a year.

I'm gobsmacked that people buy into such services, specially for mission critical stuff. The last two companies I worked for both, spent a lot of time and money getting out of hosted services because the medium to long term financial cost were so much less and the control was so much more.

I fully understand the benefit to the software publisher.

I sympathise for those creative types that have been forced to buy into Adobes subscription as they had little choice.

It's just a price increase. Unity Personal Edition licences are still free, but Professional Edition goes up by ~73%. The price of a perpetual edition effectively doubles, but instead of choosing between subscribing or buying outright you get the perpetual licence automatically after subscribing for 2 years. Unity started at the bottom and steadily improved to the point where they're competing directly against established engines far-more-expensive engines, so it's not unreasonable that their prices go up over time, but whether it's a good move will depend on if 42% or more of their customers leave due to the new price.

It's interesting to compare Unity's "rising" model with Unreal Engine's "falling" one, which took one of the best-known professional engines and progressively made it more accessible to low-end projects while still aiming to be a tech leader. UE is now completely free in exchange for a royalty fee of 5% of revenue beyond $3000, which is great for projects of all sizes up until the point where budget goes mostly toward assets and marketing, where your revenue would mainly go toward paying for things that UE didn't save you money on.

I remember that. Their choice of features to and not to include with the free version was something that put me off Unity 4. They had a lot of very fancy effects included with Personal which were absolutely brilliant for tech demos but some very fundamental things required Professional. I suppose the idea was that there would be an amateur scene that would make beautiful things for free (with the Unity logo attached) while people actually wanting to sit down and make real games would license. That might have worked very well in the 90s, but the environment has changed and Unity 4 Personal caught on more with "shovelware" authors who didn't care to scratch the surface of what even Unity Personal could do, making the Unity logo something of a mark of shame by association.

Somehow, that just made me laugh heavily as I envisioned some devs getting the Unity logo marked on their ass with a hot branding iron like during the Inquisition :o)))

I agree that it's often a difficult balance between the flexibility of programming and the ease of doing menial stuff/prototyping in editors.

As far as the development process is concerned, Unity strikes a good middle ground by offering flexibility in how the code is handled (basically as low or high-level as you want), but like I said, if you want to develop commercially with it, it carries a certain stigma on the gaming market for poor optimisation and shovelware.

Godot looks great though. Will have to look more into that. Compelling licensing terms as well, especially for an engine that supports proprietary platforms like consoles.

Cough cough.... Don't mistake the fanboys of Jim Sterling for the whole market, if doing a blind test, most people wouldn't tell a Unity game from another one if the splashscreen doesn't show up. To take the past months on GOG: Jotun, Kona, Firewatch, Pony Island, Oxenfree, Superhot, Mushroom 11, Satellite Reign, Mini Metro, etc.

Devs and sane people don't give a damn about the engine as long as it fills the needs, let the haters hate ;)

I do hope you don't mean me? I am happy to use anything, am only a dabbler.
Indeed, there are good games regardless of engine. But there is a fair bit of excess behind the engine of unity - just note the updates they made to pillars of eternity to stop it taking all memory and processor. If your doing a 3d game then unity is fine as you are using the most of the engine. 2d however really no, at least to the last version I looked at (not investigated 5), as you have all the 3d engine bolted in and 2d was basically the images put on a primitive in 3d space, so major overkill for a simple 2d game

^ same