Following yesterday's announcement by Unreal, Unity goes one step further: their engine has become 100% free (as in beer). Are these companies starting to feel the heat of open source alternatives? And what will it mean for the future of the Blender Game Engine?
Patrick Boelens writes:
Yesterday Unity kicked off their presence at GDC with an event where they announced the release of version five of their game engine of the same name. This new version sports a host of new and improved features, including a much-needed graphical boost, integrated audio tools, an updated physics engine and all-round performance optimizations.
In addition, Unity has updated it's pricing and business models. Not a day after Epic raised eyebrows by releasing their game engine - Unreal Engine 4 - for nothing but royalties, Unity takes it even a step further and releases their entire engine free of charge, without a royalty provision. This means features that were previously Pro version only can now be utlized by everyone. (Except for the editor's "dark skin"; that one's still a premium. ;))
Unity does still have a two-tier system, now called "Personal" and "Professional" editions, available, but they seem to start focusing the premiums more towards external services like analytics and cloud-based services.
Whether you prefer Unreal, Unity of any other engine, seeing more and more tools becoming available to more and more people like this is great news and a very exciting prospect indeed!
